Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Herbert
and the
Mystery of
the Word
Poetry and Scripture in
Seventeenth-Century England
g a ry k u c h a r
George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word
GaryKuchar
vii
viii A Note on References
A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but
which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in
which I myself am involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a
sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me
loses its meaning and its initial validity. A genuine problem is subject to an
appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined; whereas a
mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique. It is, no
doubt, always possible (logically and psychologically) to degrade a m ystery
so as to turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious
proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a kind of
corruption of the intelligence.
Gabriel Marcel2
We say amiss,
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
George Herbert, The Flower.
13.210.
1
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having trans. K.Farrer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965),
2
101.
ix
Acknoweldgments
xi
xii Acknoweldgments
1 Herberts Neatness 1
Herbert andtheMystery ofPlainness 5
Styles ofPiety andtheEarly Stuart Church 12
The King James Bible andtheEclipse ofMystery 21
Herbert and the Eclipse of Mystery 27
2 Mystery inTheTemple 33
The Poetry of Revelation: Ungratefulnesse 36
Revelation and Intimacy in The Search and Love (III) 41
Mystery in Translation: St. Augustine 48
The Hermeneutics of Faith 52
Mysterion Reformed: Martin Luther 53
Coloss. 3.3 Our Life is Hid with Christ in God 61
Conclusion: The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative 69
xiii
xiv Contents
9 Conclusion 257
Index 281
CHAPTER 1
Herberts Neatness
1
Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 98.
2
For a fuller discussion of this second phase, see Collinsons From iconoclasm to icono-
phobia: the cultural impact of the Second English Reformation in The Impact of The English
Reformation 15001640 ed. Peter Marshall (London: Arnold, 1997), 278307. For an
assessment of some of the qualifications of Collinsons account of second-phase English
reformation culture, see Peter Marshall, (Re)defining the English Reformation Journal of
British Studies 48.3 (2009), 564586, 5767.
3
Collinson, Birthpangs, 98.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 3
has provided a mirror for you, and there you are told, Blessed are the pure
of heart, for they shall see God (Mt 5:8). In that text a mirror is held out to
you. See whether you are one of the pure-hearted it mentions, and grieve if
you are not yet like that; grieve in order to become so. (19.110)
Construed as what Herbert calls the thankfull glasse, / That mends the
lookers eyes, the significance of scripture evolves in its ongoing disclosure
across time, space, and persons (The H.Scriptures (I), 89). From this
perspective, the ethical assimilation of scriptural revelation to oneself is not
one mode of reading among others; instead, it is a constitutive part of
the interpretive process as such. As Herbert writes early in The Church-
porch: Beware of lust: / It blots thy lesson written in thy soul; / The
holy lines cannot be understood. / How dare those eyes upon a Bible look,
/ Much lesse towards God, whose lust is all their book? (7, 912).
Second, in stressing the mysterious and evolving nature of biblical reve-
lation, Herbert participated in a broader cultural project of resisting more
dogmatic approaches to religious life in seventeenth-century England. As
I have begun to suggest, Herbert shared the concern of others in his gen-
eration that the drive for certainty within post-reformation C hristianity
results in a reductive form of faith, one that obscures wonder and awe
in favor of stability and security. Viewed this way, Herberts project as a
writer appears as a sustained attempt to negotiate two competing impulses
4 G. KUCHAR
is an almost completely blank period for the lover of religious verse, in spite
of the overwhelming concern with religion and the fervour of r eligious feel-
ing that sent Protestants to the stake and Catholics to Tyburn Perhaps
the Ages of Faith were unpropitious for the writing of religious poetry in
being too propitious.5
4
Along with Chap. 2 see Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church
in the Middle Ages trans. Gemma Simmonds (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
2006); Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries trans.,
Michael B.Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Jennifer R.Rust, The
Body In Mystery: The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Reformation
England (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2014).
5
Helen Gardner, Religion and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971), 138.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 5
Balancing stately refinement with the familiarity of the local pub, The
Banquet presents the Lords Supper as an everyday miracle in which all the
promises and teachings embodied in the person of Christ become accessi-
ble. As the speaker says in the penultimate stanza, in the act of communion
I wipe mine eyes, and see / What I seek, for what I sue; / Him I view, /
Who hath done so much for me (4548). This account of the eucha-
rist as holding all scriptural truth in potentia revealingly parallels Lancelot
Andrewes treatment of the passion in a 1605 Good Friday sermon before
the king at Greenwich. According to Andrewes, St. Luke captures the whole
of Christs story in plain and express terms [when] he calleth the Passion
a theory or sight (2.158). So richly condensed is the passion,
Andrewes declares, that were all philosophy lost, the theory of it might
be found there [in the passion] All virtues are there visible, all, if time
would serve (2.179). Implicit in these accounts of the eucharist and the
passion is the Pauline idea that the mystery of Christ (Eph. 3:4; Coloss.
4:3) unifies or gathers together all things which are in heaven and
which are in earth (Eph. 1:10). For Andrewes and Herbert, the Words
capacity to express this recapitulation (anakephalaiosis) of all things in the
person of Christ is the ultimate expression of its neatness.
Having caught a glimpse of Christs gathering together of all things in the
eucharist, the speaker of The Banquet concludes by praying to become
part of the mystery of Christ in both flesh and word, both lines and life:
One of the culminating moments in The Temple, this desire to unite with
Christ in Hands and breath shows Herberts speaker revealing signs
of deification (theosis), the idea captured in the patristic adage, God has
become man, that man might become God which is evoked in stanza
twos claim that the eucharist makes divine! (9).6 In the context of The
6
For a discussion of this concept with reference to Andrewes, see Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot
Andrewes, The Preacher (15551626): The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of
England trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 3233. For an account of
the puritan interest in this idea, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain:
HERBERTS NEATNESS 7
Disciplinary Religion & Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004), 31, 109.
7
G.K. Beale and Benjamin L. Gladd, Hidden But Now Revealed: A Biblical Theology of
Mystery (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2014).
8
Ibid.
8 G. KUCHAR
is crept into the minds of men, to think the points of religion that be mani-
fest to be certain petty points, scarce worth the hearing. Thoseyea those
be great, and none but those, that have great disputes about them. It is
not so Those are necessary He hath made plain; those that [are] not
plain not necessary. What better proof than this here? This here a mystery, a
great onereligion hath no greateryet manifest, and in confesso, with all
Christians. (1.35)
9
In A Priest to the Temple, Herbert advises country parsons to avoid the kind of text crum-
bling deployed in sermons before learned audiences in the period (235). This is context-
specific advice about how preachers should speak before rural audiences and should not be
construed as revealing any sort of general partisan or stylistic difference from Andrewes. On
this point, see Peter McCullough ed., Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), xlii. For an important dismantling of the anachronistic distinc-
tion between plain and metaphysical preaching often imposed on Herberts A Priest to the
Temple, see Mary Morrissey, Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century
English Theories of Preaching The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53. 4 (2002), 686706.
For a discussion of puritan uses of similar rhetorical strategies as Andrewes, see Janice Knight,
Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
UP, 1994), 130163. Whatever their differences, both Herbert and Andrewes shared a com-
mitment to neatness and mystery in the senses described here.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 9
The manifestation of God in the flesh the Evangelists set down by way of an
history; the Apostle goeth farther, and findeth a deep mystery in it, and for
a mystery commends it unto us. Now there is difference between these two,
manythis for one; that a man may hear a story, and never wash his hands,
but a mystery requireth both the hands and heart to be clean that shall deal
with it. (1.32)10
10
For a closely related sermon, see Andrewes, 2.383403.
10 G. KUCHAR
11
John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (London: Allen
Lane, 2013), 1345.
12
Christopher Hodgkins, Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to
the Middle Way (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 53. Hodgkins sees
Herbert as longing for the solidity of the Elizabethan settlement, particularly its more
Calvinist elements. For a reading of Herbert in relation to a similar view of the Jacobean
consensus, see Daniel W. Doerksen, Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the
English Church before Laud (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1997) and his Picturing Religious
Experience: George Herbert, Calvin, and the Scriptures (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2011). For a study of Herbert in relation to basic reformed ideas of grace and
redemption, see Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herberts
Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). This body of scholarship has under-
mined any attempt to read Herbert as a Laudian poet. The challenge now is to reassess
Herbert in light of post-revisionist historiography, especially its reconfiguring of what used
to be called the Calvinist consensus.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 11
13
My approach to Herbert and Augustinian prayer aims to expand, update, and in some
instances modify, Elizabeth Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herberts Poetry: Divinitie,
and Poesie, Met (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997).
14
For a sustained study of Herbert and the bible, see Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word:
George Herbert and the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
12 G. KUCHAR
15
For this phenomenon, see Ethan H.Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion,
and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011)
and Peter Lake, The moderate and irenic case for religious war: Joseph Halls Via Media in
context in Political culture and cultural politics in early modern England eds. Susan
D.Amussen and Mark A.Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995), 5583.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 13
it was fashionable to draw up very clear battle lines. Either Christ came to
save the elect only or he did not; either God desires to save all or he does
not A reconciliatory via media seems to have been as unnecessary as
undesirable; no appeasing grey areas; no paradoxical mysteries.19
16
Christopher Haigh, The Taming of Reformation: Preachers, Pastors, and Parishioners
in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England History 85.280 (October 2000), 572588, 584;
The Plain Mans Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England,
15701640 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 178 and Anticlericalism and the English
Reformation in The English Reformation Revised ed. Christopher Haigh (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1987), 5674. See also Judith Maltby, Prayer Book And People In Elizabethan
And Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). For a critical response to
early formulations of this school of thought, see Patrick Collinson, From Cranmer to Sancroft
(London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), 5574. For a detailed and definitive response, see
Haigh, The Plain Mans Pathways.
17
Haigh, Taming of the Reformation, 584.
18
Ibid., 5767. For a study of Herberts pastoral art see Greg Miller, George Herberts
Holy Patterns: Reforming Individuals in Community (New York: Continuum, 2007).
19
Jonathan D.Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of
Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 68. On the softening of reformed piety
in early Stuart England, see also Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and
Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 16001640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995), 413417 and Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their
Audiences, 15901640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 369. For discussions of assurance
14 G. KUCHAR
among Elizabethan Puritans, see Joel R. Beeke, Assurance of Faith: Calvin, English
Puritanism, and the Dutch Second Reformation (New York: Peter Lang, 1991) and Norman
Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1966), 121, 4885.
20
For an overview of the social dimensions of the puritan drive for control and assurance
and a discussion of the wide body of scholarship on the issue, see Bozeman, The Precisianist
Strain, 4062.
21
Cited in Charles Lloyd Cohen, Gods Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious
Experience (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 100.
22
Pettit, The Heart Prepared, 6; Cohen, Gods Caress, 75, 79; Bozeman, Precisianist
Strain, 192; Knight, Orthodoxies, 4, 53, 87, 174.
23
Bozeman, Precisianist Strain, 147.
24
For a discussion of affiance as a key puritan term, see Stephen Foster, The Long Argument:
English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 15701700 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 70. For puritan approaches to scripture, see
Bozeman, Precisianist Strain, 30; John S.Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England:
Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970); and Knight, Orthodoxies, 130163.
25
Paul van Geest, The Incomprehensibility of God: Augustine as a Negative Theologian
(Peeters: Paris, 2011), 214.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 15
26
Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 139; Knight, Orthodoxies.
27
Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a
Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), Ch. 9 and After Calvin: Studies in the
Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003); Joel R.Beeke, Assurance
of Faith; Mark E.Dever, Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and
Early Stuart England (Macon: Mercer UP, 2000); and Moore, English Hypothetical
Universalism. Although this body of scholarship is widely recognized as having superseded
R.T.Kendalls, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), it has
thus far had little effect on Herbert studies. One rarely cited exception is Lisa M.Gordis,
The Experience of Covenant Theology in George Herberts The Temple. The Journal of
Religion 76.3 (July 1996), 383401.
16 G. KUCHAR
that works righteousness amounted to Catholic heresy and that one must
ultimately ground assurance in Christ not through personal signs of justi-
fying sanctification. There are, however, significant differences of empha-
sis and style within the puritan tradition, especially between Elizabethan
pietists and a number of those writing in the following generation when
puritanism was at its least militant (16031633). This generational
difference helps explain why Herberts work shows much greater affinity
with Sibbes than with Perkins or even, for that matter, with Calvin. Sibbes
and Herbert both belonged to a generation of churchmen who reempha-
sized the virtue of wonder, the centrality of the incarnation, the impor-
tance of divine and human love (especially as expressed in the Johannine
corpus), and a more open-ended approach to scripture.
To be sure, though, these emphases often transcend parties and fac-
tions. If critiques of dogmatic certainties are audible in avant-garde
churchmen such as Andrewes and Hooker and if they register in moderate
puritans such as Sibbes and Preston, then they are also characteristic of dis-
senters such as Richard Baxter and Francis Rous. Despite many important
differences, all of these writers recognized the spiritual and social dangers
of religious polarity and exaggerated certitude. As a result, they all display
a lyrical openness to mystery and a general wariness about dogmatism that
is more characteristic of Collinsons third than second phase of the English
Reformation. In their own context, however, these writers do not form a
coherent group with an identifiable name.28 Often differing about the role
of the church as an interpretive community and on the nature of the two
remaining sacraments, as well as other issues, men as different as Andrewes
and Sibbes nevertheless responded to the internal pressures that had built
up within protestant culture over the last century in similar, if not always
identical, ways.29
28
In fact, Andrewes conspired against Preston perhaps even aiming to expel him from
Cambridge. See Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 15 and Irvonwy Morgan, Prince
Charless Puritan Chaplain (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1957), 4650.
29
As far as the conformist strain of this tradition goes, the term Anglican inevitably comes
to mind as the best of a series of inadequate terms. As even Patrick Collinson admits, the
term Anglican, which is anachronistic for the seventeenth century, is perhaps justified if we
are speaking of Lancelot Andrewes or John Donne or even of George Herbert, with his
unusual devotion to the particular, maternal genius of the British Church. The Puritan
Character: Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture (UCLA:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1989), 16. Collinson makes a similar point when
he situates Herberts A Priest to the Temple in relation to Hookers Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
in From Cranmer to Sancroft, 5556. See also Diarmaid MacCullochs wry description of
HERBERTS NEATNESS 17
Among the most important of these shared responses was the devel-
oping recognition that religious identities were often a matter of style
and temperament as well as dogma. By the early Jacobean period, it was
becoming increasingly clear that ones spiritual and expressive orientation
could be as consequential as the substance of ones theology; or more
precisely, that ones theology could only be construed through its rhe-
torical mediations and practical applications. In the case of the puritan
movement, for example, much more was at stake than a doctrinal consen-
sus. At issue was the manner in which key doctrines were communicated
through practical divinity, how they were applied in pastoral and polemical
contexts.30 While this generally meant that puritans held basic protestant
beliefs more rigorously than others, it also resulted in a wide variation of
religious styles within puritanism itself. This variation was so pronounced
that puritanism ultimately had no stable ideological valence; it could
be moderate, hierarchical, repressive and orthodox, but it could also be
divisive, extreme, and heterodox. Which aspect of this complex ideo-
logical mixture predominated depended on a whole series of social
and intellectual forces.31
Like Herbert, puritans seeking to avoid social divisiveness often drew
on the nondogmatic strains of St. Augustine as a way of tempering the
more polemical features of godly piety. As William Haller observes in
his foundational study of puritanism, preachers such as Sibbes may have
been Calvinist to varying degrees but the French reformers positive,
clear, dogmatic intelligence did not, on the whole, provide a model of
discourse which they chose to imitate when they mounted the pulpit.32
Richard Baxter, a dissenter, as the first of the Anglicans in The Latitude of the Church of
England in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas
Tyacke eds. Fincham and Lake (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 4159, 5859.
30
Peter Lake, Moderate puritans and the Elizabethan church (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1982) 7; Patrick Collinson, The Jacobean Religious Settlement: The Hampton Court
Conference in Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government
ed. Howard Tomlinson (London: Macmillan, 1983), 2752, 2930; J.Sears McGee, The
Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 16201670 (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1976), 711.
31
Peter Lake, A charitable Christian hatred: the godly and their enemies in the 1630s
in C.Durston and J.Eales eds. The Culture of English Puritanism 15601700 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996), 14583, 1823.
32
William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia UP, 1938; rpt. Harper and
Row, 1957), 85. Hallers basic view is given fuller elaboration in Knights, Orthodoxies in
Massachusetts.
18 G. KUCHAR
33
Ibid. Owen C. Watkins makes the same point with reference to Richard Norwoods
spiritual autobiography in The Puritan Experience (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1972),
61, 80.
34
Mark E.Dever, Richard Sibbes, 122. Seeing Sibbes thought in the context of the soften-
ing of reformed theology helps explain a feature of his thought that Pettit observed but
didnt account for, namely Sibbes practice of writing with a minimum of concern for the
rigors of dogma. See The Heart Prepared, 67.
35
Cited in Christopher Haigh, Success and Failure in the English Reformation Past and
Present 11.173 (2001), 2849, 28.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 19
36
Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967;
rpt. 2004), 37.
37
Charles W.A.Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy,
16031625 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 10.
38
See Peter White, Predestination and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English
Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 140; and
Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of
Anglicanism 16251641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 93. Even those who sharply dis-
agree with Whites critique of revisionary accounts of the Jacobean and Caroline churches
agree that Stuart religious culture is better defined as a complex spectrum riven with tensions
than a set of fixed binaries structuring a static consensus. See, for instance, Peter Lake,
Predestinarian Propositions Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46.1 (1995), 110123.
39
Anthony Milton, Anglicanism by Stealth: The Career and Influence of John Overall
in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke eds.
Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 159176, 175, 173.
See also Lake, The moderate and irenic case for religious war, 756.
40
See Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 203. For Hooker, see Nigel Voak,
Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2003).
20 G. KUCHAR
41
Hence the calculated ambiguity of Herberts The Water-course, a poem that says
nothing to which Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Perkins, or Andrewes could object on
strict theological grounds. For the relevant issue of Gods judgment pertaining to the poem,
see Richard A.Muller, The Myth of Decretal Theology Calvin Theological Journal 30.1
(1995), 15967, 163. I discuss the poem in Chap. 5. Here it is also helpful to recall that the
rise of a Calvinist orthodoxy in protestant Europe was partly the result of the Frenchmans
capacity for highly precise definitions, a virtue that churchmen of Herberts generation often
avoided. For this feature of Calvins thought, see Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin, 184.
42
Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 285. See also P.G.Lake, Calvinism and the English Church
15701635 Past & Present 114.1 (1987), 3276, 4950; Prior, Defining the Jacobean
Church, 6; and McGee, Godly Man, 711.
43
For the most nuanced statement along these lines, see Cummings, The Literary Culture,
281327. Although Cummings observes that the Calvinist/anti-Calvinist binary often
breaks down in the period, I see this as more self-consciously typical, more purposefully
HERBERTS NEATNESS 21
Needless to say, this does not mean that doctrine is irrelevant for under-
standing Herberts poetry. On the contrary, it means that we must attend
to the formal mediations of theology in his lyrics. Rather than being a
statement of faith, a Herbert poem is a complex aesthetic process con-
sisting of an implied backstory, a beginning, a middle, and an end, all of
which are mediated by voice, form, figure, and allusion. And although the
application of doctrine to life is often a crucial feature of Herberts spiri-
tual aesthetic, it constitutes part of the poetic experience rather than being
its ultimate, synchronically translatable result. On the one hand, then,
Herberts generous ambiguity is a function of his attention to poetic form
and the experience that particular lyric forms represent and generate. As a
first-rate critical theorist, Herbert recognized that a lyric poem is an event
in the participating consciousness of the reader as well as a representation
of an unfolding experience on the part of the speaker. On the other hand,
however, Herberts generous ambiguity is also as an expression of a spiri-
tual ethos taking shape within Herberts own lifetime. While this ethos
possesses deep continuity with earlier phases of the Reformation, it also
shows important differences of style and emphasis as Herbert responded
to the periods shifting contexts and changing exigencies alongside men as
different as Andrewes and Sibbes.
characteristic, of early Stuart divinity than he does. See also Louis Martz, The Generous
Ambiguity of Herberts The Temple, in ed. Mary A.Maleski. A Fine Tuning: Studies of the
Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton (Binghamton NY: MRTS, 1989), 3156 and Bruce
A.Johnson, Theological Inconsistency and Its Uses in George Herberts Poetry George
Herbert Journal 15.2 (Spring: 1992), 218.
44
See Adam Nicolson, Gods Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (New York:
Perennial, 2004), 251 and Benson Bobrick, Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible
And The Revolution It Inspired (New York: Penguin, 2002), 313.
22 G. KUCHAR
45
Gerald Hammond, English Translations of the Bible in The Literary Guide to the Bible
eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1987),
647667, 661.
46
Nicolson, Gods Secretaries, 7778; David Norton, A History of the English Bible As
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 623.
47
See Nicolson, Gods Secretaries, 77, 145 and appendices 3, 4, and 5 of Bobrick, Wide as
the Waters, 301317.
48
This nondogmatic attitude is articulated in the prefatory letter Translators to the
Reader, which I discuss in Chap. 3.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 23
age in a world in which many of the things that mattered most in English
Protestantism hinged on differences over questions of security and clarity.
And few, if anyone, in Jacobean England had more scholarly authority on
such issues than Lancelot Andrewes whom Herbert praised in the dedica-
tory address to Musae Responsoriae as a watchman of heaven, / Whose
learning none on earth can equal, / Whose matchless holiness the stars are
witness to (quo sanctius astra vident) (45).
Beginning around 1592, Andrewes began publicly criticizing the spiri-
tual overconfidence of a great many [who] think that presumption in
being secure of their salvation is good divinity (5.531).49 He was particu-
larly concerned with protestants who were reducing faith to a systematic
exercise graspable through reason. He thus mocked those who had Gods
secret decrees at their fingers ends the number and order of them
just with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (3.32). Behind such efforts, Andrewes spied an
unrealistic expectation of total assurance of salvation through faith alone,
one that had negative spiritual and social consequences. Fearing that
Gods mystery was being eclipsed in the period, Andrewes complained
how even some that are far enough from Rome think they perceive all
Gods secret decrees, the number and order of them clearly; and areindeed
too bold and too busy with them (3.328). As loaded terms like bold and
busy indicate, Andrewes intended target at such moments were puritans,
particularly those who behaved as though the word of God had come
to them only, and none besides (2.408).
However broadly Andrewes intended such anti-puritan remarks, his
critique applies much more to the programmatic style of divinity associ-
ated with the Intellectual Fathers William Perkins and William Ames
than it does to the lyrical and affective piety of the Cambridge Brethren
led by Sibbes and Preston.50 After all, what ultimately worried Andrewes
49
Although I modify emphases and make some additions, the following account of
Andrewes derives largely from Peter Lake, Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and avant-
garde conformity at the court of James I in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court ed.
Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 113133. Many of my quotes are used
to similar effect in his article. See also Nicholas Tyacke, Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth
of Anglicanism in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 15601660 eds.
Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), 533 and Lori Ann Ferrell,
Government By Polemic: James I, The Kings Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity
16031625 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). For strong evidence that Andrewes radical
reassessment of the English Reformation extended well back into the 1580s, see
McCullough, Lancelot Andrewes, xiii, xvi.
50
For the use of these categories, see Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts.
24 G. KUCHAR
51
Lake, Andrewes and avant-garde conformity, 115.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 25
52
For Whitgifts arguably reductive view of edification, see Coolidge, Pauline Renaissance
2354 and Lake, Anglicans and Puritans: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought
from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 19, 39, 65.
53
Cited and explained in Lake, Anglicans and Puritans, 39.
54
See McGee, Godly Man, 1057 and Morgan, Prince Charless Puritan Chaplain, 3940.
55
For Andrewes figuring of biblical polyphony as song, see his 1619 Nativity Sermon
(1.215232).
26 G. KUCHAR
56
For a discussion of some of these strategies, see Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, 32100.
57
See, for example, 1.215232.
58
For important correctives to the view that Hooker and Andrewes constituted an avant-
garde style of piety, see Ferrell, Government By Polemic; Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church;
and White, Predestination and Polemic.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 27
If Herbert came to agree with those who were concerned about a post-
Elizabethan eclipsing of mystery, it was perhaps because he was unusually
well positioned to see two of the diametrically opposed ways in which it
manifested in the period. As a young man at Cambridge, a member of par-
liament for the borough of Montgomery, and priest in the English church,
Herbert had occasion to confront dogmatic claims to certainty grounded
in crude forms of scriptural interpretation and the forms of spiritual inspi-
ration that often and irritatingly accompanied them. Such experience may
help explain why Herbert suggests in The Country Parson that the minis-
ters greatest threat is Spirituall pride and selfe-conceite (238). But as
the younger brother of Lord Cherbury, whose 1624 treatiseDe Veritate
was probably the most influential work of rational theology in seventeenth-
century England, Herbert was also close to the dreaded threat of deism
which Pierre Viret and Robert Burton both warned of prior to Cherburys
bombshell.59 Despite their enormous differences from one another, these
two tendencies share something essential in Herberts view: they both
foreclose the place of mystery in religious life in favor of certainty and con-
fidence. But where dogmatists do this on the basis of scriptural authority
and personal experience of the Holy Spirit, rationalists do it on the basis
of universal reason and the forms of natural religion to which it gives rise.
Herbert understood these dynamics rather well. Wary of both dogma-
tism and rationalism, Herbert perspicuously recognized how the spiritual
and hermeneutic sustenance provided by the experience of mystery was
coming under pressure from two very different flanks. In response, he
exploited the resources of the religious lyric to revitalize long-standing
but newly threatened Christian investments in the idea of revelation as a
mysterion. Many of the key formal features of Herberts verse, including
its patterning of correction and revision, work to estrange common scrip-
tural idioms, thereby generating wonder about its neatness. Ultimately,
Herberts conception of poetry as a particular kind of spiritual practice is
concomitant with, and perhaps even to some extent an outgrowth of, his
view of scripture as a living mystery. In poetry, that is to say, Herbert saw
much more than a medium for personal expression or noncontroversial
pastoral care; in it, he saw a privileged way of sustaining the vitality of
mystery at an historical moment when it no longer went without saying.
60
Esther Gilman Richey, The Property of God: Luther, Calvin, and Herberts Sacrifice
Sequence ELH 78.2 (2011), 287314, 302.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 29
With typical Herbertian irony, the answer to this confusion brings with
it yet another level of bewilderment. In the following stanza, the speaker
reflects upon himself only to conclude, with the emphasis on the penulti-
mate syllable: I cannot skill of these my wayes (12). Like Christianitys
greatest critic of rationalism Sren Kierkegaard, Herbert assumes that
experiences worthy of the name edifying are, more often than not, dismay-
ing, for such experiences estrange and surprise even as they may ultimately
enrich, expand, and console. As Kierkegaard writes:
61
Sren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Oxford UP,
1961), 102.
30 G. KUCHAR
62
For a discussion of the paratactic structure of medieval religious lyrics, see Patrick
S. Diehl, The Medieval European Religious Lyric: An Ars Poetica (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), 15.
HERBERTS NEATNESS 31
63
For an explanation of the distinction between mysteries and problems, see the quote
from Gabriel Marcel in my epigraph to this book.
32 G. KUCHAR
While these dangers were known to early reformers like Luther and
Calvin, they greatly increased in the following century. Writing in the wake
of such pressures, Herbert also came to see that a hermeneutically robust
notion of mystery is the sine qua non of any Christian poetry worthy of the
name. And out of this awareness came not only a little volume of poetry
printed in duodecimo format called The Temple but also a set of formally
mediated spiritual and exegetical insights that would play a decisive role in
nourishing subsequent biblical literature in Englandand beyond.
CHAPTER 2
1
Raymond E. Brown, S.S. The Semitic Background of the Term Mystery in the New
Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 3.
2
Daniel G.Van Slyke, The Changing Meanings of Sacramentum: Historical Sketches
Antiphon 11.3. (2007), 245279. The following discussion leans heavily on Slykes article
along with the scholarship noted in footnote 3.
3
See G.Bornkamm, Mysterion in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament Vol. 4.
ed. Gerhard Kittel trans. and ed. Geoffrey W.Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1967),
802828; Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery (New York: Biblo and Tannen,
1971); Chrys C.Caragounis, The Ephesian Mysterion: Meaning and Content (Lund: CWK
Gleerup, 1971); Louis Bouyer, The Christian Mystery: From Pagan Myth to Christian
Mysticism trans. Illtyd Trethowan (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990). Beale and Gladd, Hidden
But Now Revealed, 305319. For a discussion of these issues in the context of political theol-
ogy see Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2013), esp. Chap. 2.
4
Slyke, Changing Meaning, 250251. For a fuller treatment of Tertullians use of sacra-
mentum see J.De Ghellinck, Pour lhistoire du mot sacramentum, vol. 1, Les Pres Antnicens
(Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1924), 59152.
5
Ibid., 264. Lubac makes the same point with reference to Algerius of Lige in Corpus
Mysticum, 49.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 35
6
Emmanuel J.Cutrone Sacraments in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia eds.
Allan D.Fitzgerald etal. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 742.
7
Ibid.
8
Slyke, Changing Meaning, 267. For Augustines view of this term see C.Couturier
Sacramentum Et Mysterium Dans LOeuvre de Saint Augustine, tudes Augustiennes
(Paris: Aubier, 1953), 161332.
9
Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture trans. E.M. Macierowski
(Edinburgh: Eerdmans, 1998), 2.20. For an explanation of some of the shortcomings in
Lubacs overall study of exegesis, see Ryan Mcdermott Henri De Lubacs Genealogy of
Modern Exegesis and Nicholas of Lyras Literal Sense of Scripture Modern Theology 29.1
(2013), 124156.
10
See, for example, Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2.8398.
11
Slyke, Changing Meaning, 259; Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 4154.
12
Caragounis, The Ephesian Mystery, 139140, 143, 145.
36 G. KUCHAR
14
A Journey into England by Paul Hentzner in the Year MDXCVIII, ed. Horace Walpole
(Strawberry Hill: 1757), 82.
38 G. KUCHAR
the Old Testament associates with Gods secret judgments through the
Hebrew term sod which is a rough equivalent of the Greek mysterion.15
This is the Hebraic idiom that Lancelot Andrewes presupposes when he
complains of Men that sure must have been in Gods cabinet, having,
as they do, Gods secret decrees at their fingers ends (3.32). In a
logic-defying way, Herberts rare cabinets morph from being objects
containing treasure into inaccessibly divine persons passing judgments and
withholding secrets. Only retrospectively, then, can we connect the verb
made with the image of the cabinet. Viewed from this widened perspec-
tive, the rare cabinets turn out to have been councils with the power to
make things happen by fiat. Our earlier confusion is now partly clarified
as the poems idioms accumulate in meaning over time in the process
ofexploring the significance of Colossians depiction of the mysteries of
God, and of the Father, and of Christ, In whom are hid all the treasures of
wisedome, and knowledge (Col. 2:23).
Herberts unexpected use of the verb made in stanza two further
recalls the biblical idiom that is often deployed in the New Testament to
figure Gods incarnation, such as Galatians 4:45 which Andrewes sys-
tematically estranges in his 1609 Christmas Day sermon. In this sermon,
Andrewes declares: When the fullness of time was come, God sent His
Son, made of a woman, made under the Law (my emphasis).16 Andrewes
dialectical approach to these idioms parallels the movement of mystery
and clarity unfolding in Herberts lyric. On one hand, Andrewes turns
these phrases over and over so as to accumulate a host of meanings and
associations. On the other, however, he repeats Pauls idioms with such
frequency that the verb made becomes unmoored from its referent, like
a precocious child playing word games. One result of this latter movement
is to genuinely estrange whatever it is Paul may be saying about the incar-
nation exactly; or as Andrewes puts it with self-conscious confusion: To
make Him any thing is to mar Him, be it what it will be (1.52). Taken as
a whole, Andrewes multilingual dialectic of meaning and mystery engen-
ders a renewed sense of how Pauls idioms disclose the extraordinary
generosity of the incarnation. Praising and estranging Gods kenotic self-
emptying in the act of incarnation (Phil. 2:58), Andrewes teaches that
15
See Brown, Semitic Background.
16
Andrewes pursues a similar strategy in his 1611 Christmas Day sermon before the king
at Whitehall. See 1.9091.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 39
whatsoever else He had been made, it would have done us no good. In this
then was the fulness of His love, as before of His Fathersthat He would
be made, and was made, not what was fittest for Him, but what was best for
us; not what was most for His glory, but what was most for our benefit and
behoof. (1.53)
The strangeness of the verb made and the semantic instability of the
word cabinet are only two ways in which Ungratefulnesse imitates
scriptural processes of unfolding revelation in similarly estranging ways as
Andrewes.
Another important formal device Herbert deploys in the poem involves
stanza structure. Each of the first four sestets moves outward toward open-
ness and generosity, then inward toward the intimate or unknown or both,
and then outward again. This breath-like movement is partly expressed
through shifting meters as Herberts sestet holds four short lines between
two longer pentameter ones, all in a poem that is exactly 30 lines long.
Appropriately enough, he uses this movement in stanza 3, beginning at
line 13, to both disclose and conceal the trinitarian mystery:
While eternal life and the inner reaches of the Trinity remain tucked away
in the middle of the stanza, like jewels in a rare cabinet, the promise of
fuller revelation returns in the distending assonance of the closing line.
Happening within each stanza as well as across the poem as a whole, the
lyrics movement of disclosure and concealment is rhythmic and palpa-
ble, as well as semantic and numerological. Each stanza is thus figured as
though it were itself a little cabinet revealing and withholding treasure.
The penultimate stanza further clarifies the kind of divine generos-
ity being praised in Ungratefulnesse. Only now the language is more
homely as the incarnation is figured as Gods attempt to alleviate the anxi-
ety caused by his enormous gap in station with his bride(s)-to-be. Like
an unconflicted Mr. Darcy, God generously stoops beneath his status in
order to offer humanity a box we know in the person of Christ (23).
40 G. KUCHAR
See Sibbes 1:73 for a discussion of how sinners churlishly refuse Christs mercy.
17
John Preston, Irresstiblenesse of Converting Grace, 15, cited in Moore, English Hypothetical
18
sense of shame coupled with not a little hint of pride, Herberts bride-to-
be chooses slumber.19
The rejection of divine intimacy bemoaned in Ungratefulness is also
of concern in The Country Parson, especially The Parsons Dexterity
in Applying Remedies. Teaching ministers how to comfort those who
despair of Gods mercy, Herbert somewhat equivocally asserts that
Christians have the pledges of Gods Love in two ways:
the one in his being, the other in his sinfull being: and this as the more faulty
in him, so the more glorious in God. And all may certainly conclude, that
God loves them, till either they despise that Love, or despaire of his Mercy:
not any sin else, but is within his Love; but the despising of Love must
needs be without it. The thrusting away of his arme makes us onely not
embraced. (283)
On the one hand, the passage seems to imply that although the human
will cannot reject Gods love entirely, it can nevertheless refuse his embrace
thereby obscuring the signs of Gods love. On the other hand, however,
there is a lurking sense here that despising Gods love in the final instance
amounts to something like the unforgivable sin against the holy ghost of
Mark 3:2830. If the latter reading has any legitimacy, it is because Herbert
stresses the idea that Gods embrace of sinners is his greatest act of charity
(agape). While God is said to love his creation in the way an artist loves his
work, he ultimately loves sinners in the way that a loving parent loves his
children (283). To reject such love, Herbert implies, is to reject Gods fullest
act of self-revelation.
19
Frances Cruikshank overlooks the revelatory nature of Herberts poetics in her other-
wise valuable Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010)
when she asserts: The metaphors by which God communicates His nature and His activities
are not mysterious but efficacious. They are not given as a code to be deciphered, but as
instructions to be followed, a bidding to be heeded (46).
42 G. KUCHAR
20
For a similar reading of The Search but in the context of early modern discourses of
godly sorrow, see my The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2008), 1824.
21
Pace Hillary Kelleher, Light thy Darknes is: George Herbert and Negative Theology
George Herbert Journal 28.12 (20042005) pp. 4764, I see no evidence that Herbert
deploys distinctly Pseudo-Dionysian strategies or imagery in his verse. While negative theol-
ogy is certainly important to Herbert, as Kelleher persuasively shows, its forms are generally
more Augustinian than Dionysian in idiom and structure.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 43
22
For this and other Augustinian contexts in The Search, see my The Poetry of Religious
Sorrow, 1824.
23
See sermon 117in The Works of St. Augustine (2nd Release), 13.209223 and Paul van
Geest, The Incomprehensibility of God, 18, 138.
44 G. KUCHAR
rather than fearful ingratitude as the phrase two for one is replaced with
Gods miraculous Making two one.
If The Search explores Gods apparent absence, then the final poem
in The Church, Love (III), depicts the effects of his overpresent
generosity. In this respect, Herberts poem dilates on the communion
rite inThe Book of Common Prayer, particularly its claim that Ye know
howe grevous and unkynde a thing it is, when a manne hath prepared
a riche feaste: decked his table with al kynde of provisyon, so that there
lacketh nothinge but the gestes to site downe: and yet they whych be
called wythout anye cause, mooste unthankfully refuse to come.24 In
responding to this passage, Love (III) further develops the dynamics of
revelation and divine generosity at issue in Ungratefulnesse and The
Search. The difference in Love (III) is that Gods presence manifests in
the single form of incarnate Love rather than the dual form of immanent
and transcendent deities of the earlier poems. Revealingly, the exigency for
and the idioms of The Churchs concluding poem further parallel the
concerns expressed in The Parsons Dexterity in applying of Remedies.
It is almost as though this highly enigmatic lyric stages the unanswerable
argument that Herbert encourages country parsons to use on those who
despair of Gods love. According to Herbert, if the country parson sees
Christians
24
The Book of Common Prayer. The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 ed. Brian Cummings
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 130.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 45
and shame (9, 13). In this way, Herbert dramatizes the fear that Gods
overpresence inspires in scriptural passages such as Job 13:21 Withdrawe
thine hand far from me; and let not thy dread make mee afraid and
Canticles 6:5 Turne away thine eyes from me, / for they have overcome
me. Only now the scene is more quietly domestic than sublime, its osten-
sible familiarity both revealing and concealing the dramas life-defining
profoundness:
25
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge In Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2003), 56.
26
Ibid., 61, 68. I discuss this feature of The Thanksgiving in Chap. 8.
46 G. KUCHAR
face in love, hence the term of endearment he uses in the very gesture of
withdrawing from God: Ah my deare. Being pulled in two directions at
once, the speaker cannot bear Gods generosity even as he wishes to accept
it. The dynamic here is similar to the one Bernard of Clairvaux identifies in
his commentary on the Song of Songs when he observes how The spirit
is filled with dread even while it is stirred.27 Instead of meeting Gods
gaze, the speaker only perceives his own shame reflected back to him and
thus he recoils back into his box apart. Realizing that the speaker is still
clinging to the privacy and isolation of Sinnes Round, Love immediately
responds to his misprision, taking his hand and asking: Who made the
eyes but I? In this tender gesture, Love echoes The Country Parsons
advice that pastors should counsel those in despair by insisting that God
loves all that he has made (283). Insufficient as a strategy, however, Love
then adopts a more frank tone, asking: know you not who bore the
blame for your sin (15)? Here again, Love continues with the advice
given in The Country Parson now echoing Herberts advice to coun-
sel those anxious of salvation by insisting that in taking sin upon himself
Love overcame that hate [of transgression] (283). Finally succeeding,
this second approach implies the Pauline idea that when the time of judg-
ment comes, Christ will cover his sins, thereby making unmediated inti-
macy possible: For now we see in a mirror dimly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known (1
Cor. 13:12). Accepting the extraordinary conditions of Loves invitation
and the promise of fullness that it entails, the speaker, no longer shrinking
and hiding, is now finally able to sit and eat (18).
The ending of Love (III) is graceful in its simplicity. Its sweetly comic
final line calls to an end all the struggling and recoiling that goes on in
the lyric, as though to say, with almost Jane Austen like irony: What took
you so long? Was it really so hard? Delicate and subtle, the sense of release
achieved in the final line is nevertheless exquisitely, even unspeakably,
liberating. It suggests that for Herbert faith amounts to the intellectu-
ally simple but spiritually excruciating commitment that God recognizes,
loves, and accepts sinners simultaneously and that the name for this tran-
scendently inhuman generosity is grace.
The carefully qualified confidence achieved at the end of the poem
is signaled in the speakers chosen physical posture at The Temples final
27
Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs IV trans. Irene Edmonds (Kalamazoo:
Cistercian Publications, 1980), 4.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 47
feast: I did sit and eat. In The Parson in Sacraments, Herbert inter-
prets sitting at the eucharist as a sign of spiritual preparedness. Recalling
King James Is view that physical posture during communion is a matter
indifferent,28 Herbert teaches that
the Feast indeed requires sitting, because it is a Feast; but mans unpre-
parednesse asks kneeling. Hee that comes to the to the Sacrament, hath the
confidence of a Guest, and hee that kneels, confesseth himself an unworthy
one, and therefore differs from other Feasters: but hee that sits, or lies, puts
up to an Apostle: Contentiousnesse in a feast of Charity is more scandall
then any posture. (259)
The crisply frank line I did sit and eat resolves the drama played out in
Ungratefulnesse as the speaker now enjoys the confidence requisite to
divine intimacy, at least for the moment. Less an ending than an initiation,
the final stanza of Love (III) complements the turn to last things at
the end of The Church. After all, it suggests that the speaker is ready-
ing himself for the arrival of the son of Man in the rather beguiling sense
demanded by the Gospel of Luke: Be yee therefore ready also: for the
sonne of man commeth at an unexpected hour, an houre when yee
thinke not (Luke 12:40). In its broader context, then, Love (III) pres-
ents us with a feast that is both present and eschatological, enigmatic and
homely, at once. In this respect, it conveys the already-and-not-yet nature
of Gods kingdom, a spiritual process that is present and happening but
not yet complete. As such, Love (III) ends The Church much as the
final stanza of The Banquet completes its celebration of the eucharist:
as an invitation to the banquet of the kingdom that is now, forever, and
yet to come.
Despite the highly elevated scenario that it depicts, Love (III) focuses
attention on its neat coincidence of mystery and plainness. This deftly han-
dled balancing of familiarity with strangeness partly rests on the depiction
of divinity in the poem. On one hand, the divine majesty that engendered
alienation in poems such as Ungratefulnesse is now more modestly
concealed. As a result, Love (III) creates better conditions for a fuller
reception of Gods overwhelming mercy than most earlier poems. On the
other hand, however, Love is now literally present, speaking directly to
28
Roland G. Usher, Reconstruction of the English Church (New York: Appleton and
Company, 1910), 2:354
48 G. KUCHAR
the speaker without the mediations of prayer. Stilling the dialectics of rev-
elation and concealment, this balance of tensions dissolves the distances
between human and divine more fully than perhaps any other poem in
The Church. Most importantly, the plain language used for the poems
elevated scenario has the paradoxical effect of engendering wonder and
estrangement while nevertheless conveying a sense of spiritual comfort
and religious readiness. Maintaining such tension is a delicate task. Even
more, it is a pressing cultural exigency for Herbert, hence the placing of
Love (III) at the climax of The Church.
What is achieved over the course of these three interrelated poems, and
thus The Temple as a whole, is a carefully calibrated and hard-won spiri-
tual confidence, a delicate sense of holiness. If Love (III) expresses and
instills a sense of assurance, it is one that is nevertheless strikingly modified
by awe over the simplicities and terrors of Gods communicating will, and
its patterning of revelation-in-concealment and concealment-in-revelation.
29
Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2.20.
30
For a discussion of this usage, see Peter M.Candler Jr., Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction
or Reading Scripture Together on the Path to God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 3.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 49
In The Beginning Was the Word. This sermon provides a striking gloss
on Herberts general exegetical sensibility, especially as encapsulated in
the epiphany We say amiss, / This or that is: / Thy word is all, if we
could spell (The Flower, 1921). According to Augustine, the open-
ing chapter of the Gospel of John
can only be understood in ways beyond words; human words cannot suffice
for understanding the Word of God. What we are discussing and stating is
why it is not understood. I am not speaking in order that it may be under-
stood, but telling you what prevents it being understood (Non nunc dicimus
ut intelligatur, sed dicimus quid impediat ne intelligatur). You see, it is a
kind of form, a form that has not been formed, but is the form of all things
that have been formed; an unchangeable form, that has neither fault nor
failing, beyond time, beyond space, standing apart as at once the founda-
tion for all things to stand on, and the ceiling for them to stand under all
things are in it (omnia in illo sunt). And yet because it is God, all things are
under it. What I am saying is how incomprehensible is the passage that was
read to us. But in any case, it wasnt read in order to be understood, but in
order to make us mere human beings grieve because we dont understand it,
and make us try to discover what prevents our understanding, and so move
it out of the way, and hunger to grasp the unchangeable Word, ourselves
thereby being changed from worse to better. The Word, after all, does not
make progress, or grow, when someone who knows it comes along. But it
is whole and entire if you abide in it, whole and entire if you fall away from
it; whole and entire when you return to it; abiding in itself and making all
things new. (13.21011)31
encompassing him, namely the abiding presence of Gods love that brings
the bewildered, even slightly frustrated speaker of Mattens into speech:
I cannot ope mine eyes, / But thou art ready there (12).
Sermon 117 also illuminates the rather qualified forms of negative
theology animating The Search. By the end of this poem, the speaker
realizes that one should not teach Christians how to understand God
so much as how not to understand him. Much more invested in mysta-
gogy than theology, The Search leads readers into a relationship with
God by showing his speaker discovering the value of the negative way,
especially in the clear yet elusive ending in which the promise of unity
is expressed in a manner that not only sustains but deepens the divine
mystery. The Searchs discovery of the negative way both contrasts and
complements Love (III), which shows a speaker how to approach God
through divine love (via amoris). While The Search begins with nega-
tion and non-understanding only to end by expressing the via amoris,
Love (III) unfolds the via amoris throughout, thereby bringing it to
fulfillment within the context of The Temple. In doing so, it suggests that
the experience of divine love begins with an avowal of non-understanding.
Such interweaving of the negative way and the way of love is very much
in keeping with St. Augustines approach to mystagogy, especially as con-
veyed in Sermon 117.32
Even more importantly, Herberts celebration of Gods mystery in The
Temple is animated by Augustines idea of the bible as mysteriorum scrip-
tura, divinorum sacramentorum libri.33 From this perspective, scripture is
the living Word of God into which one continually re-enters, as though
into an ever-renewing tabernacle or marriage. On this account, the
Christian reader of scripture is more like a character in an unfolding story
than a subscriber to a constitutional charter or philosophical system. In
Augustines view, the mysteries of scripture constitute a dynamic spiritual
context more than a static set of messages; they are a sacrament of God
experienced in the first person rather than a set of divine statements that
can be abstracted into a third-person standpoint or possessed once-and-
for-allin the form of a message or statement. And because readers stand
within scriptures evolving compass, they cannot, in principle, compre-
hend the whole of it. This is why Andrew of St. Victor can say that divine
1901.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 51
mysteries are discovered in such a way that there always remains some-
thing to discover and Saint Gregory can claim that scripture advances
with those who read it.34 This is likely also why when discussing the
Christians arduous pursuit of wisdom, Augustine uses the terms circuitus
and ambulatio to suggest a parallel with Hellenistic mystery rites.35 These
hermeneutic and sapiential principles inform the dialectical structure of
poems such as Ungratefulnesse as biblical idioms are simultaneously
clarified and estranged. In the case of Ungratefulnesse, this process leads
to an open-ended conclusion in which readers are implicitly challenged
to differentiate themselves from the generic Christian with whom they
must also inevitably identify. By correcting the generic Christians rejec-
tion of God at the end of Ungratefulnesse, readers reopen the mystical
repast that is suddenly foreclosed at the poems end. Through this pro-
cess, readers find themselves reinitiated in the mysterion as the primordial
drama of Superliminare replays itself anew.
When Herbert presents the act of entering The Temple in the Pauline
context of pagan mystery rites in Superliminare, he intimates the connec-
tion between initiation and mystery that is concomitant with an Augustinian
view of scripture. According to such a view, the moment of religious under-
standing is, by definition, an experience of (re)initiation, a waking up to
a relationship that situates or grounds ones overall perspective and being.
The idea that spiritual understanding constitutes a point of reentry into the
corpus mysticum helps explain Herberts tendency to treat initiation as a kind
of master trope, especially with respect to the way he concludes poems. Like
Andrewes sermons, Herberts poems often end by reopening the scriptural
or sacramental mystery rather than by concluding in a fully close-ended way.
Superliminare and Love (III), which begin and end The Church,
exemplify the invitational nature of Herberts endings, just as The Banquet
does. Implicit in this literary strategy is the idea that an event of spiritual
understanding involves becoming part of the light by which one perceives.
At bottom, mysterion is a hermeneutic concept identifying the interpenetra-
tion of reader and text, of interpreter and Word, in exactly this way.
This structure of participatory understanding is opposed to the more
objective knowledge that Herberts friend Francis Bacon championed
in the realm of natural philosophy. For Bacon, the interpenetration of
34
Cited in Henri de Lubac, The Splendour of the Church trans. Michael Mason (London:
Sheed and Ward, 1956), 11 and Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2.205.
35
Eugene TeSelle, Augustine The Theologian (London: Burns and Oates, 1970), 76.
52 G. KUCHAR
36
Lake, Lancelot Andrewes and avant-garde conformity, 115.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 53
This account of faith recalls Richard Sibbes claim that faith knoweth
no distance of place, as well as no distance of time to the eye of faith
all things are present (7.118) and so it is a great art in faith to appre-
hend Christ suitable to our present condition (7.214). But what is crucial
is the way Herbert translates this view of faith into a specifically herme-
neutic context. In doing so, he implies that believers can no more be done
with the gospel than they can be done with the environment in which
they live, a point he intimates in Christmas when he declares to God
that The pasture is thy word: the streams, thy grace (19). In this view
of things, scripture is more a context than a set of messages; it cannot be
fully reduced to a set of problems that can be answered or promises that
can be possessed. Instead, scripture is a relationship or environment into
which one is continually reinitiated. In other words, rather than a set of
propositions faith primarily consists of a widening of perception as the
opening of Faith suggests: Lord, how couldst thou so much appease /
Thy wrath for sinne, as when mans sight was dimme, / And could see
little, to regard his ease, / And bring by Faith all things to him? (14).
This is the hermeneutic attitude presupposed by Herberts description of
scripture as a book of stars.
process that can never be fully completed once and for all.37 In intellectual
circles, however, the renewed importance of this practice was complicated
by the fact that protestants were coming to terms with the increasing gap
between a biblical text now studied in Hebrew and Greek and an outdated
theological system rooted in church Latin.38
As modern biblical scholarship developed over the course of the sev-
enteenth century, the idea that scripture is the living Word of God came
under increasing pressure. While some historians blame this process on
the supposed scholasticism of seventeenth-century protestant ortho-
doxy, Richard A.Muller sees it as an inevitable casualty of the changing
hermeneutical landscape of early modern Europe.39 In his view
the farther the hermeneutics moved away from the quadriga (or fourfold
allegorical method) toward a strict literal, grammatical, linguistic, and con-
textual analysis of the text itself, the less tenable did the interpretive con-
cept of viva vox Deiand related concepts, like the christological scopus
scripturaebecome. And it was the age of orthodoxy in the seventeenth
century that saw the further flowering of textual criticism and of the study
of the cognate languages of the Bible. If existential language of the viva vox
Dei became more difficult to maintain hermeneutically in the seventeenth
century, it would become impossible in the eighteenth and nineteenth.
Critique of the Protestant orthodox for the (partial!) loss of this dimension
of the Reformation view of Scripture amounts to little more than an unre-
quited and unrequitable theological nostalgia.40
37
See Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to his Thought trans. R.A.Wilson (London:
St Jamess Place, 1970), 9899.
38
Richard A.Muller, Post-Reformation Dogmatics Volume 2. Holy Scripture: The Cognitive
Foundation of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1993), 488.
39
For the idea that protestant orthodoxy betrayed the gains of the early Reformation, see,
for example, Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith trans. James W.Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1960), 305332. For the view that Luther had an inadvertent hand in this process, see
Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther trans. Robert Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1966), 52.
40
Muller, Post-Reformation Dogmatics, 934. See also 321 and de Certeau, Mystic Fable,
1213.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 55
Nowhere in Holy Scripture does the noun, sacrament, bear the meaning
which is customary in the church, but rather the opposite. In every instance,
it means, not a sign of something sacred, but the sacred, secret, and recon-
dite thing itself.43
God than they realized. In his view, The words of Christ are sacraments
by which he works our salvation because The Gospel words and stories
are a kind of sacrament, that is, a sacred sign, by which God effects what they
signify in those who believe.44 Remediating medieval sacramental theol-
ogy in the context of biblical exegesis, Luther believed that Christians
could approach the deity through the words of scripture in a manner once
reserved for the altar.
Luthers redefinition of mysterion is a striking example of the ecclesi-
astical and spiritual consequences arising from changes in definitions of
mystery outlined in Michel de Certeaus The Mystic Fable.45 As de Certeau
explains, over the course of the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries,
the term mystic and its various correlates ceased to mediate the threefold
body of Christ (historical, sacramental, and scriptural). The result was a fun-
damental change in the meaning of corpus mysticum along with a general
breakdown of the mutually supportive relations among scripture, church,
and sacrament. Prior to the twelfth century, the term corpus mysticum sub-
tly distinguished the eucharist from the physico-historical body of Christ.
Functioning liturgically and sacramentally, it expressed an interactive,
mutually dependent relation between the eucharist and the production of
the church as a living body growing in time. In the centuries following,
however, the corpus mysticum degenerated into a more static sociological
term for the ecclesial body alone. Through this process, a dynamic sense of
the eucharists interaction with the church as a developing body of lay and
clerical participants gave way to a more bifurcated and institutionally rigid
sense of the church as a hierarchical instantiation of divine authority.
In other words, in its pre-twelfth-century form the term mystery was
more an action than a thing.46 And as an action, it denoted a dynamic
interplay among Christs historical, scriptural, and ecclesial manifesta-
tions. But from the twelfth-century onward, the three parts of Christs
body became more rigidly distinguished as patristic mystery idioms failed
to mediate among the different dimensions of Christs threefold body.
Consequently, a more rationalized and politicized conception of the
church arose along with a more narrowly construed view of the eucharist
44
Christmas Sermon (1519) as cited in Phillip Cary, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of
External Things in Augustines Thought (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), viii.
45
de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 8285. As de Certeau explicitly indicates, his argument
constitutes a kind of sequel to Lubacs Corpus Mysticum. See also Rust, The Body in Mystery,
89.
46
Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 49; cited in Rust, Body in Mystery, 7.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 57
Matters of the highest majesty and the profoundest mysteries are no longer
hidden away, but have been brought out and are openly displayed before the
very doors. For Christ has opened our minds so that we may understand the
Scriptures See, then, whether you and all the Sophists can produce any
single mystery that is still abstruse in the Scriptures.48
The paradox guiding Luthers defense is the one Donne expresses in Satire
3 when he says that scriptural mysteries / Are like the sun, dazzling, yet
plain to all eyes (8788).49
While Luther stressed the paradox of mystery-in-plainness, he also
recognized that such a view was not without spiritual and hermeneutic
dangers, especially in the wake of humanist scholarship. When overempha-
sized, scriptures monological clarity can lead to legalistic dogmatism or,
even worse, historicism. The potential for a reductive biblicism is always
present in a theology which stresses a literal-grammatical approach at
the expense of spiritual reading, especially when it serves to bolster the
need for a mode of assurance that is greater than the conjectural cer-
tainty offered by the medieval church (a point to which I shall return).
In order to be assured of ones salvation with the confidence that early
reformers desired, one must be certain of what scripture says on the mat-
ter. Cognizant of the reductive potential within the co-related principles
of faith alone and scripture alone, Luther developed a number of strategies
to ward off threats posed by historicism, legalism, and radical spiritualism.
One of the most potent of these was his particular interpretation of the
dialectic between law and gospel.
For Luther, the dialectic of law and gospel served to combat the fore-
shortening of the bible that he saw in the historicism of late medieval
writers such as Nicholas of Lyra as well as in the radical spiritualism of
Anabaptists.50 In Luthers view, Lyra stressed scriptures historical dimen-
sions at the expense of its saving and promissory aspects thereby weaken-
ing the bibles vitality. In a different way, he saw Anabaptists privilege the
48
Luther, Bondage of the Will, 111.
49
John Donne: The Major Works ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 2931.
50
The following discussion of Luthers dialectic of law and gospel is informed by Gerhard
Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to His Thought, 110140; Word and Faith (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1963), 305332; Gerhard O. Forde Law and Gospel in Luthers
Hermeneutic Interpretation (37.3: 1983), 240252; and Gerald Bruns, Hermeneutics:
Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992), 139158. For Luthers response to
Anabaptism see Luther, Preface to Romans, LW: 35: 368; LW, 40:83; Karlstadts Battle with
Luther: Documents in a Liberal-Radical Debate ed. Ronald J.Sider (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1978); and Louise Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise: The Search for Certainty in the Early
Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 8893.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 59
51
Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, LW 31:349 and Augustine, Confessions, 10:40, 10:
45, 10:60 as cited in Phillip Cary, Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 84.
52
Luther, Bondage of the Will, 201.
53
For this and other key passages on the deus absconditus in Luther see Althaus, Theology of
Martin Luther, 2021.
54
For the idea that Luthers emphasis on the hidden God played a kind of prophylactic
function in his thought, protecting the sphere of mystery from other aspects of his theology,
see John Dillenberger, God Hidden and Revealed: The Interpretation of Luthers Deus
60 G. KUCHAR
that the divine will such an intrenching is, / As passeth thought (The
Search 3738) and in his description of the Trinity which access denies
and affrights (Ungratfulnesse 14, 21). At such moments, Herbert
stresses the Luthero-Calvinist belief that in communicating his presence
God simultaneously conceals his essence so as not to overwhelm humans
with his power.55
Judging by Lancelot Andrewes sermons, however, Luthers empha-
sis on the hidden God and his dialectic of law and gospel did not go far
enough in sustaining a sense of Christian mystery, at least not as it was
needed within the context of early Stuart England. At various points in
his sermons, Andrewes expresses a degree of impatience with the drive
for certainty and clarity that is necessarily bound up with sixteenth-
century translations of mysterion. In his 1607 Christmas Day sermon on 1
Timothy 3:16, for example, Andrewes insists that the mystery of godliness
or exercise of godlinesscall it whether ye will we call the Sacrament;
the Greek hath no other word for it but M, whereby the Church
offereth to initiate us into the fellowship of this days mystery (1.43).
This relatively generous translation of mysterion rebuts Calvins rigorous
disambiguation of the Vulgates translation of godliness as a sacramentum
in his biblical commentary on 1 Timothy 3. Rebuking papist ecclesiology
much as Luther did, Calvin rails against the Vulgates promiscuous use of
the term sacramentum and the uncertainty that it generates. For Calvin,
It is a shocking blasphemy to say, that the word of God is uncertain,
till it obtain from men what may be called a borrowed certainty.56 In
this instance, the exegetical differences between Calvin and Andrewes are
partly a matter of context. Preaching for a king with ecumenical aspira-
tions, Andrewes was less motivated by anti-Catholic polemic than Calvin
was. As a result, he was able to adopt a more liberal attitude toward trans-
lation, one that not only sustained but even reveled in ambiguity and mys-
tery. Thus, rather than disambiguating the Vulgate text, Andrewes unfolds
the meaning of godliness from multiple points of view so as to initiate
Absconditus and its Significance for Religious Thought (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press,
1953), 16 and Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, 285.
55
For discussions of Calvins development of the deus absconditus see Edward A.Dowey,
JR. The Knowledge of God in Calvins Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), esp., 12
and Susan E.Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?: Calvins Exegesis of Job from Medieval
and Modern Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 91155.
56
Calvin, Calvins Commentaries 23 Volumes trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker
Books, n.d.), 21.9091.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 61
readers into a gravida mysteriis, one mystery [that] hath many mys-
teries with it (1.34). His aim in doing so is not to provide exegetical
certainty but to recreate the experience of discovering scripture as though
for the first time. To do this, Andrewes openly draws on a Latin translation
of mysterion that earlier reformers had rejected on philological grounds.
In the Bodlean manuscript, the acrostic dimensions of the lyric are even
more obscure as the diagonally set words are not consistently expressed
typographically. In both texts, though, the poem captures the paradoxes
inherent in St. Pauls concept of mysterion as a mode of divine manifesta-
tion that remains partly out of sight despite its being fully disclosed. In
this way, Herberts poem articulates something like Sibbes claim in The
Hidden Life that A Christian is a strange person. He is both dead and
alive The life of a Christian is a secret life. It is a peculiar life It is
secret because it is hid Gods children are secret ones. They are not
known to the world, nor to themselves oftimes (5.2067).
Taking the form of a confession, Coloss. 3.3 presupposes a rich back-
story. Rather than presenting one of the many spiritual Conflicts that
have past betwixt [himself] and God, the poem presents the results of an
encounter with God. More a fully realized epiphany than an unfolding med-
itation, the poem functions as a spiritual portrait, an image of the Christian
as simultaneously sinner and saved, dead and alive. Despite its analogies with
portraiture, however, this ten-line poem is not static. As its organizing meta-
phors of celestial orbiting imply, the lyric expresses a view of spiritual life as
a life of motion and movement, an eternal journey as it were.
Ernest Gilman and Eric B. Song have independently demonstrated
that the spiritual motion expressed in the poem involves allusions to ana-
morphic perspectives.59 A kind of pictorial conceit, an anamorphic image
59
Ernest B.Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth
Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978), 190191 and Eric B.Song, Anamorphosis and the
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 63
presents two discrete images that are both visible within one visual plane,
thereby creating a sense of movement and dynamism. This is the kind of
visual image that Herbert alludes to when he says that devils are but sins
in perspective (Sinne (II), 10). According to Song, Herberts poem
exploits the anamorphic images uncanny capacity to make viewers feel as
though they are inside rather than outside the visual frame. He begins by
noting that the grammatical incongruities of Our life is hid with Christ
are doubled by the coexistence of two incongruous images, one corre-
sponding to the life of the flesh and one to the life of Christ. What is
crucial, however, is that both of these images define us as Christian read-
ers, visually externalizing and thereby mirroring our condition of being.
Through these anamorphic doublings, Song explains, Coloss 3.3. not
only arrests our gaze as readers/viewers (as subjects, we are literally called
into the picture, and represented here as caught) but also mirrors or
enacts our condition as divided subjects.60 To fully understand the visual
dynamics of this poem, however, and to better appreciate it as an example
of Herberts revelatory poetics, we need to take its exegetical contexts into
closer account.
To start with, Herberts use of anamorphic figures in Coloss. 3.3
likely arises from his reading of Luthers commentaries on the New
Testament. As Eugene Cunnar observes in his interpretation of Herberts
The Windows, Luther consistently equates Pauls words with painting
particularly anamorphic vision.61 Evidently fascinated by the recent
development of anamorphic perspective, Luther draws on perspectival
metaphors in order to express the interpretive process of spiritual reading.
As Cunnar indicates, this is especially evident in Luthers explanation of
Johns discussion of typology. According to Luther, the Gospel of John
explains the sense in which Christ is the skopos or ultimate goal of scrip-
ture. In the Gospel, the Lord
shows us the proper method of interpreting Moses and all the prophets.
He teaches us that Moses points and refers to Christ in all his stories and
illustrations. His purpose is to show that Christ is the point at the center of a
Religious Subject of George Herberts Coloss. 3.3 SEL 15001900 47.1 (2007), 107121.
Song does not cite Gilman.
60
Song, Anamorphosis and the Religious Subject, 116.
61
Eugene R.Cunnar, Herbert and the Visual Arts: Ut Pictura Poesis: An Opening in The
Windows in eds. Edmund Miller and Robert DiYanni. Like Seasond Timber: New Essays on
George Herbert (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 101138, 108.
64 G. KUCHAR
circle, with all eyes inside the circle focused on Him. Whoever turns his eyes
on Him finds his proper place in the circle of which Christ is the center. All
the stories of Holy writ, if viewed aright, point to Christ.62
Luthers account of Christ as both origin and ultimate horizon of all scrip-
tural meaning turns on a striking modification of Nicolas of Cusas influen-
tial thesis about the nature of Gods gaze. In De Visione Dei, Cusa explains
Gods gaze by figuring it as analogous to the seemingly omnivoyant gaze
of a painted face which is positioned at the center of a room, thereby
creating the effect it seems to behold everything around it.63 Giving a
characteristically modern twist to his fellow Germans late-medieval think-
ing, Luther deepens the decentered position of the viewing subject that
Cusa presumes. For Luther, the experience of reading scripture aright is
like viewing an anamorphic image which, fully seen, reveals the perspec-
tival omnivoyance and scriptural omnipresence of Christ as God. And in
the act of feeling our decentered selves beheld by an absolutely centered
deity, we recognize our proper place has been prepared for us and we can
then settle into it as right-reading, right-seeing Christians. Indeed, we
recognize that we are, in effect, the place that God has determined for us
within the compass of his grace. The visual dimensions of Coloss. 3.3
constitute a formal means of conveying this exegetical principle, this idea
that the Christian reader is within rather than without the scriptural frame.
Luthers and Herberts uses of anamorphic tropes to describe the expe-
rience of finding oneself in scripture reveal at least two things. First, they
suggest that both writers use such figures as a way of communicating a
particular version of the de te fabula principle, the idea that the texts
meaning is only revealed once we realize that we are in the story itself. And
second, they suggest that in becoming a Christian subject one is thrown
out one out of oneself as worldly being in order to discover oneself by
means of a return journey made through and by Christ. In other words, it
is not human desire but Gods desire in Christians that makes them sons of
God. As Richard Sibbes says: Let us labour to be righteous men, labour
to be in Christ, to have the righteousness of Christ to be ours, to be out of
ourselves in Christ (7.7). Herberts Coloss. 3.3 not only conveysthe
62
Cited in Cunnar, Herbert and Visual Arts, 108. Cunnar cites this passage as LW,
21.337. It is actually 22.339.
63
Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusas Dialectical Mysticism: Text, Translation, and
Interpretive Study of De Visione Dei (Minneapolis: Arthur J.Banning Press, 1985), 113.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 65
dialectic of sin and sanctity inherent to Pauline soteriology, but it also con-
veys the exegetical sense of scriptural immanence underwriting it.
Closer to home, Herbert may have known that Lancelot Andrewes
developed Luthers anamorphic figures in his 1605 Good Friday ser-
mon before the king at Greenwich. Carefully analyzing the way that
Greek prepositions express modes of spiritual perception in the gospels,
Andrewes encourages Christians to perceive Christ as a living mystery as
well as a dying man. Here again, the distinction between history and story
is crucial to Andrewess investment in participatory reading:
64
For this point see Robert McMahon, Herberts Coloss. 3.3 as Microcosm in George
Herbert Journal 15.2 (Spring 1992), 5569, 61.
66 G. KUCHAR
65
Ibid., 64.
66
See Bouyer, The Christian Mystery, 176.
MYSTERY INTHE TEMPLE 67
67
The Poems of Nathaniel Wanley ed. L.C.Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 19.
68
Thomas Wilson, Theological Rules serving to guide us in the understanding and prac-
ticse of holy Scripture (1615), 21.
68 G. KUCHAR
meth harvest? Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and looke on
the fields : for they are white already to harvest. In the first instance,
the reference is to a temporal harvest but in the second it refers to the
harvest of eternity through grace, a harvest that is both now and ever.
Herbert expresses the gap between these two meanings through the
anamorphic play of reference, emphasizing the leap of faith one must
take in order to perceive the eternal within and through the tempo-
ral. Revealingly, this is precisely what the speaker of Home remains
unable to do. Adopting a strong contemptus mundi attitude that is out
of keeping with the Advent season occasioning the poem, the speaker
of Home complains that although We talk of harvests; there are no
such things, / But when we leave our corn and hay (5556), further
recalling the ironic complaint in The Collar: Have I no harvest but
a thorn (7). Impatient with Christs absence, the speaker of Home
dislocates the paradox of eternity within time that the Gospel of John
introduces. This refusal to take the leap of faith that accounts for the
impatience of Homes refrain: O show thy self to me, / Or take
me up to thee! Unlike the speaker of Coloss. 3.3., the speaker of
Home seeks after absolute certainty in the here and now. As a result,
he is unable to avow Sibbes insight that there are two contrary prin-
ciples always in a believer, doubt and faith, assurance and mystery
(5.476). Without an awareness of this duality, the Christian seeks a
premature way out of this weary world rather than being able to
love the strife (Home, 37, The Banquet, 54).
Failing to sustain Johns paradox that Christ makes an eternal harvest
present even in the dark of winter, the speaker of Home not only suc-
cumbs to a disenchanted view of the natural world but also to a deaden-
ing view of scripture. Ultimately, the final corrective turn belongs to the
reader as we must decide if the final stanzas break in rhyme marks the
arrival of Christ or not. Herbert does not decide for us:
69
Hans W.Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale UP, 1974). Gerard Reedy, S.J. briefly mentions the
passing of participatory exegesis among late seventeenth-century Anglican preachers in
Robert South (16341716): An Introduction to His Life and Sermons (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1992), 74.
CHAPTER 3
With the rise of modern biblical scholarship and the success of the prot-
estant Reformation, seventeenth-century England witnessed a decline in
exegetical optimism, the fading of conviction in scriptures simplicity.1 If
interpretive confidence had been a virtue when reformers were fighting a
rearguard action in the early Reformation, it became a potential liability
once protestants found themselves in positions of ecclesial and political
authority. What is worse, it became increasingly difficult to sustain such a
view of scripture in light of ongoing philological and theological debate.
So, while Luther faced a polemical situation that led him to stress scrip-
tures perspicuity, John Hales found it necessary to warn his 1617 Oxford
audience that there is more obscurity in scripture than in any writing that
I know secular or divine.2
In making such a case, Hales was stating in strong terms what the
translators of the AV had publically acknowledged half a decade earlier.
In his prefatory letter The Translators to the Reader, Miles Smith
declared that as far as difficult passages are concerned fearfulnesse would
1
For the use of the phrase exegetical optimism to describe post-reformation exegetical
developments, see Susan E.Schreiner, The Spiritual Man Judges All Things: Calvin and
Exegetical Debate about Certainty in the Reformation in Biblical Interpretation in the Era
of the Reformation eds. Richard A.Muller and John L.Thompson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1996), 189215, 197 and David C.Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1986), 96.
2
John Hales, Sermon Concerning The Abuses of holy scripture (Oxford: 1617), 3637.
To be a doer of the word is, as St. Gregory saith well, convertere scripturas
in operas, to change the word which is audible into a work which is visible,
the word which is transient into a work which is permanent.
Or rather not to change it, but, as St. Augustine saith, accedat ad verbum,
unto the word that we hear let there be joined the element of the work,
3
See Thomas Cranmer, Certayne sermons, or homelies (N.P. 1547), B2v-B3r and The seconde
tome of homelyes (London: 1563) Fol. 159v-160, 169.
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 73
that is, some real elemental deed; et sic fit magnum sacramentum pietatis,
and so shall you have the great mystery or sacrament of godliness. For
indeed godliness is as a sacrament if it be not a sacrament it is not true
godliness. (5.195)
4
See Susan Schriener Are You Alone Wise? and The Spiritual Man Judges All Things;
Richard H.Popkin The History of Skepticism From Savonarola to Bayle revised and expanded
74 G. KUCHAR
ungodly men declare that no man can be certain of the forgiveness of his
sins For faith is the work, not of man, but of God alone, as Paul teaches.
God does the other works through us and by us; in the case of faith, He
works in us and without our co-operation.6
edition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003); Barbara Pitkin, What Pure Eyes Could See: Calvins
Doctrine of Faith in Its Exegetical Context (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999); J.P. Callahan,
Claritas Scripturae: The Role of Perspicuity in Protestant Hermeneutics Journal of the
Evangelical Theological Society. 39.3 (1996), 353372; Joel R. Beeke, Assurance of Faith;
Edward A.Dowey, Jr., The Knowledge of God; and T.H.L Parker, Calvins Doctrine of the
Knowledge of God (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969). I draw heavily on Schreiner in the
following sequence.
5
On this point, see Pitkin, What Pure Eyes, 36. For a discussion of medieval concepts of
faith as a voluntary certainty (voluntaria certitudo), see G.R.Evans, Getting it Wrong: The
Medieval Epistemology of Error (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 166176.
6
Luther, Pagan Servitude, 296.
7
Luther, Bondage of the Will, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation eds.
E.Gordon Rupp and Philip S.Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 109. See
Popkin, History of Skepticism, 910.
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 75
the steps of the righteous do not slip but go straight ahead, safe and sure, in
good conscience, because he is certain of his cause But the wicked always
fall and slide around, and their step is uncertain. (14:224)
8
Cited in Schreiner, Are You Alone, 97.
9
See Ibid., 37130.
10
Beeke, Assurance of Faith, 13.
11
Luther, Bondage of the Will, 108. See Schreiner, The Spiritual Man Judges, 189.
12
As cited in Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 60.
76 G. KUCHAR
13
Schreiner, The Spiritual Man, 190 and Are You Alone, 84129, esp., 103.
14
Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, 50.
15
Martin Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert,
(Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2003), 137138.
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 77
Calvins Certainty
By the time Calvin wrote, some of the dangers involved in making certi-
tude a criterion of biblical truth had already become increasingly visible.
As Susan Schreiner explains, in Calvin we can discern a kind of reserve
that seems to reflect the awareness of past difficulties posed by claiming
the Spirit as the source of certainty. Unlike earlier reformers, Calvin was
much more reticent to cite the familiar passages from Romans, Galatians,
and the Gospel of John in order to validate his interpretations with refer-
ence to the Spirit.16 And like Luther, Calvin rejected any attempt to ground
ones assurance in speculation about predestination separate from faith in
Christ. They are madmen, Calvin taught, who seek their own salvation
or that of others in the whirlpool of predestination, not keeping the way of
salvation which is exhibited to them. For Calvin, this way of salvation lies
in faith through an effectual calling: To every man, therefore, his faith is a
sufficient attestation of the eternal predestination of God. Holding to the
view that the testimony of the Holy Spirit is nothing else than the sealing
of our adoption (Rom. viii.15), Calvin maintained that the experience of
calling via sanctification can strengthen faith and hence assurance but it
cannot ground them.17
But if Calvin qualified the assurance one can derive from the Spirit,
he nevertheless augmented the security made available through faith. In
the course of revising The Institutes, Calvin evolved a definition of faith
that went from primarily meaning trust to eventually meaning certain
knowledge.18 While early editions of The Institutes tended to define faith
16
Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 103.
17
Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John trans., William Pringle (Grand
Rapids: Baker Books), 17:254.
18
See Pitkin, What Pure Eyes, 40; T.H.L Parker, Calvins Doctrine of the Knowledge of God,
5; and Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 66.
78 G. KUCHAR
19
Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.15 as cited in Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 66.
20
Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 67.
21
Sermons of M. John Calvin on the Epistles of St. Paul to Timothy and Titus (London:
1579), 321. Subsequent references are given in text.
22
T.H.L Parker, Calvins New Testament Commentaries 2nd edition (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1993), 102. See also Muller, After Calvin, 164165, and Schreiner, Where Shall
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 79
Wisdom Be Found?, 91. This attitude is perhaps even more true of William Tyndale for whom
the Word, as John Bossy notes, was addressed to no one and everyone, like the Ten
Commandments which were to replace statues and images behind the altars of English
churches. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 14001700 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 99.
For a strongly stated view of the interpretively reductive and socially divisive aspects of this
kind of early reformation hermeneutics, see James Simpson, Burning to Read: English
Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge: The Belnkap Press of Harvard
UP, 2007). For a related set of conclusions arrived at from an entirely different methodologi-
cal standpoint, see Haigh, The Plain Mans Pathways to Heaven
23
John Calvin, Concerning Scandals trans. John W.Fraser (William B.Eerdmans Grand
Rapids Michigan 1978), 722.
80 G. KUCHAR
Jesus Christ did not only appeare man, but shewed in deed that he was God
almightie If we once know this, wee may well perceive that it is not
without cause, that Saint Paule sayeth, that all the treasures of wisdome
are hidden in our Lorde Jesus Christ. So then, we shall knowe the height
and depth, the length and largenesse, yea, whatsoever is necessarie for our
salvation. (333)
24
Schreiner, Spiritual Man Judges, 193.
25
Bossy, Christianity in the West and McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England. For a
strongly worded but by no means devastating revisionist critique of McGee, see Nicholas
Tyackes review of The Godly Man in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 20.1 (January
1978), 123124.
26
Bossy, Christianity in the West, 120.
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 81
God is love, and hee that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.
Herein is our love made perfect, that wee may have boldnesse in the day of
Judgment, because as hee is, so are we in this world. There is no feare in
love, but perfect love casteth out feare.
27
My discussion of Herberts and Andrewes use of Johannine concepts of assurance is
informed by Paul Cefalus magisterial study The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern
English Religion and Literature (Oxford UP: Forthcoming) and from personal conversation
with him.
28
Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, Appendix Two, 446459 and Cefalu, Johannine
Renaissance, Chap. 4.
29
Pitkin, What Pure Eyes Could See, 91.
30
Ibid., 8397.
82 G. KUCHAR
Following both John and Paul, Andrewes suggests that it is through the
manifestation of love in the context of Christian fellowship that believers
derive a sense of assurance and an understanding of godliness. Moreover,
rather than downplaying wonder and mystery at the dynamics of faith and
love, Andrewes stresses them. The result is a text that counters the under-
lying assumptions that sometimes made Calvinist preaching divisive in
its psychological and social consequences and thus potentially limited
in its intellectual and spiritual appeal.31 Viewed in his wider European
and historical contexts, Andrewes ultimately appears like of one of Bossys
nervous conservatives diagnosing the fissiparous forces unleashed by
31
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 15591625
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 108.
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 83
32
Bossy, Christianity in the West, 140.
33
For a fuller elaboration of this thesis, see Cefalus The Johannine Renaissance
(Forthcoming). For a broadly related approach to Herbert, see Terry Sherwood, Herberts
Prayerful Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).
34
Beeke, Assurance of Faith, 24; H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor
Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1958), 319.
35
Ibid.
36
See Cary, Inner Grace, 119.
84 G. KUCHAR
by desolation than exalted above measure (474). So, rather than focus-
ing on doubt as an obstacle to be overcome, Hooker stresses its spiritually
positive functions.
Hooker then turns to address those who fall into despair as a result
of an unrealistic expectation of assurance. In a sequence that is as pas-
torally moving as it is politically calculated, Hooker explains that in
really severe cases of religious despair clerics cannot offer solace by
explaining the privy operations of the Spirit in our heart as can be
done in more common cases. Instead, ministers comforting those in
true despair must
favour them a little in their weakness; let that be granted which they do imagine;
be it that they are faithless and without belief. But are they not grieved for their
unbelief? They are. Do they not wish it might, and also strive that it may, be
otherwise? We know they do. Whence cometh this, but from a secret love and
liking which they have of those things that are believed? No man can love
things which in his own opinion are not. (475)
The exigency behind this remarkable sequence derives from the kinds
of pastoral and theological problems posed by self-proclaimed reprobates
such as Francis Spiera whose story first appeared in England around 1550
only to recur in popularity, especially among puritans, in the 1580s and
1590s.38 So well known was the Spiera case that Hooker could take it for
granted that his audience would recognize it as a major subtext of this
particular sequence.39
After renouncing a number of his protestant beliefs before the
Inquisition, Spiera suffered terrible pangs of conscience and died appar-
ently convinced of his own damnation. In the process, he became the
most well-known figure of the Italian Reformation and the subject of
intense scrutiny across Europe for over a century.40 From the time of his
self-accusations, theologians debated whether there was ever any hope
38
See Michael MacDonald, The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and
Emotion in Early Modern England Journal of British Studies 31.1 (Jan. 1992), 3261, 38.
The following discussion of Spiera leans heavily on Macdonalds article.
39
For the ubiquity of the Spiera case in Tudor England, see Erin E.Kelly, Conflict of
Conscience and Sixteenth-Century Drama ELR 44.3 (2014), 388419, 391392.
40
For Spieras Italian reception, see M.A.Overall, The Exploitation of Francisco Spiera
The Sixteenth Century Journal 26.3 (1995), 619637.
86 G. KUCHAR
41
Ibid., 631.
42
Matthew Gribaldi, A Notable and Marveilous Epistle (London, n.d.), Aiii; cited in
MacDonald, 46.
43
See Wulfert De Greef, The Writings of John Calvin: An Introductory Guide trans. Lyle
D.Bierma (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2006), 118126.
44
Hugh Latimer, The Works of Hugh Latimer Volume 1 ed. George E.Corrie (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1844), 425.
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 87
45
See Overall, The Exploitation of Francisco Spiera, 634.
46
See W.Speed Hills, The Evolution of Hookers Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in Studies
in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary To an Edition of His Works ed. W. Speed Hill
(Cleveland: Case Western Reserve, 1972), 117158. The following two paragraphs reiterate
and try to build on Hills reading of Hooker.
88 G. KUCHAR
the major tensions within the church were going to remain unresolved.
Peter Lake puts the point sharply when he asserts that the Barrett episode
marks the moment when the foundations of high Elizabethan protestant-
ism started to crumble With the collapse of the Lambeth Articles, the
Calvinist claim to represent the sole fount of orthodoxy in the Church of
England was definitively discredited.50 In short, the Barrett affair helped
give rise to the more eclectic and ultimately less stable synthesis of beliefs
and practices characteristic of writers in Herberts and Sibbes generation.
Much more was at stake in the Barrett controversy than the personal
question of election. At issue was the broader question of certainty itself.
Given that certainty often functioned as a criterion of biblical truth, rather
than just a by-product of right belief, the spiritual and theological stakes
were very high. Since the issue of certainty had become methodological
as well as soteriological, the act of questioning assurance of salvation was
equivalent to deflating religious confidence as such.51 Little surprise, then,
that these controversies did not go away for long.
Debates over spiritual security remerged at the beginning of James
reign during the Hampton Court Conference in January of 1604. The
conference witnessed a number of leading bishops square off against influ-
ential moderate puritans, including John Reynolds, president of Corpus
Christi, Oxford, and future translator of the King James Bible. On the
second day of the conference, Reynolds tried to persuade King James
to adopt the Lambeth Articles in order to clarify the churchs stance on
questions of grace, especially the matter of perseverance.52 According to
William Barlows official narration of events, the bishop of London and
future Archbishop, Richard Bancroft warned against Reynoldss proposal.
As Barlow tells it, Bancroft took occasion to signifie to his majesty, how
very many in these daies, neglecting holiness in life, presumed too much
of persisting of grace, laying all their religion upon predestination.53
James is then said to have concurred, remarking that
50
Lake, Moderate Puritans, 239.
51
Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 37130. For a related account of the Barrett affair, see
Cummings, Literary Culture, 290.
52
William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference at Hampton Court
(1605), printed in E.Cardwell ed. A History of Conferences and Other Proceedings connected
with the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer, 15581690 3rd edition (Oxford, 1849),
178.
53
Ibid., 180.
90 G. KUCHAR
54
Ibid., 181.
55
Usher, Reconstruction of English Church, 336. For an important account of James shift-
ing views of Calvinism and puritanism and for his probable strategy at the Hampton Court
Conference, see Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James
I, Journal of British Studies 24.2 (April 1985), 169207.
56
Venice: April 1603, in Calendar of State Papers Venice, Volume 10, 16031607, ed.
Horatio F Brown (London, 1900), 216.
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 91
that they who have the greatest serenity of natural understanding, and the
largest measure of Divine Revelation withal, must yet confess the unfath-
omed depth of the judgments and ways of God, which are abyssus multa,
rather to be admired than searched into.58
The implication is that those who are most spiritually mature are those
most sensitive to what they do not know.
Peter Lakes suggestion that Sandersons investment in mystery was a
rhetorical ploy designed to ingratiate himself with the Laudian establish-
ment may not do the man full justice.59 After all, Sandersons investment
in mystery is fully in evidence in the anti-Arminianism of Pax Ecclesiae in
1625. More importantly, this kind of emphasis on mystery is one of the
ways Jacobean religious culture avoided dogmatic extremes and the con-
flict it engenders. To be sure, though, Sandersons 1625 sermon does not
57
For a subtle account of why the king came to endorse Montagues works, see Fincham
and Lake, The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I, 202207.
58
Robert Sanderson, Pax Ecclesiae in The Works of Robert Sanderson: Six Volumes
(Oxford: 1854), 5.256. The work was first printed in Izaak Waltons 1678 Life of Sanderson.
59
Peter Lake, Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert
Sanderson Journal of British Studies, 27.2 (April, 1988), 81116, 104.
92 G. KUCHAR
show the strain of polarization that his later, Laudian, work does.60 The
difference is so pronounced that after the Restoration he evidently sought
to suppress Pax Ecclesiae for fear that it was too tolerant of moderate divi-
sion.61 This is probably because by the time of the Restoration the rhetoric
of mystery had become more of an authoritarian reflex for suppressing dis-
sent than an irenic avowal of human and institutional limitations. In any
case, behind Pax Ecclesia lay many of the lessons that Richard Hooker had
taught, especially those pertaining to the issue of certainty and theological
disagreement.
Indeed, the shift from Elizabethan rigidities to Jacobean anti-dogmatism
that so informs Herberts poetic and spiritual style is partly animated by
Hookers views on scripture and tradition. While Calvin tended to see
conflicts over scripture in somewhat absolutist terms, viewing them as a
symptom of sinfulness that should ultimately be overcome, Hooker tended
to see them as normative and unavoidable.62 As a result, Hooker presup-
poses that all scriptural interpretation, at least at some level, is partial and
vulnerable to error. While Calvin acknowledged the inevitability of dis-
agreement over scripture among people of true faith, he did not integrate
this principle into his understanding of the biblical tradition in as broad a
way as Hooker did.63 Writing in more viciously polemical contexts, Calvin
found it necessary to view disagreement as an unavoidable consequence
of human sinfulness and the limitations of human reason, especially as it
was further corrupted by the perversions of nonbiblical traditions. For
Hooker, on the other hand, disagreement over scripture is an inherent
feature of the dynamic unfolding of faith and reason in action over time
in the form of tradition. Unlike his puritan opponents, Hooker believed
that Christian tradition constitutes an ongoing, socially and historically
mediated conversation about the nature of faith and revelation. What it
60
Compare, for example, Sandersons 1625 Pax Ecclesia with his more partisan 1639 court
sermon on 1 Timothy 3.16 delivered at Berwick, July 16 collected in XXXVI Sermons
(London: 1689 8th edn.), 479491.
61
David Novarr, The Making of Waltons Lives (Ithaca: Cornell, 1958), Chap. 11, especially
412430.
62
John K Stafford, Scripture and the Generous Hermeneutic of Richard Hooker
Anglican Theological Review 84.4 (2002) 915928 and Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church,
260.
63
In the preface to his commentary on Romans, Calvin echoes Augustines claim that
some disagreement over scripture among the truly faithful is to be expected (Commentaries,
19. xxvii).
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 93
does not consist of is a set of fixed beliefs and practices derived from an
unmediated encounter with scripture. To this extent, Hooker accentuates
a muted strain within Augustines thought. In his letter To Simplicanus,
Augustine hints at the historical contingency of dogmatic formulae, the
idea that words about God are never immutably true and thus subject to
change and correction.64 Developing Augustines capacity for a plural-
ism of interpretations as of formulations,65 Hooker sought to define the
acceptable parameters within which members of the Church of England
could peacefully disagree with one another about what it means to be a
member of the true church. Possessing a different view of tradition than
Calvin, Hooker assumed that being a member of a living church necessar-
ily meant participating in a debate about what it means to be a member of
such a church. The problem involved limiting the debate in such a way as
to preclude unnecessary dissent and division.66
In cultivating this kind of attitude, Hooker was not defending a preexist-
ing Elizabethan orthodoxy so much as he was trying to frame the debate
going forward.67 Rather than simply firming up the state church as he found
it, Hooker was arguing that the Christian tradition necessarily consists of
self-consciously imperfect acts of interpretation unfolding within the social
context of an inevitably flawed church. His general aim was to loosen
the necessary connections among protestant claims to scriptural simplic-
ity, authority, and assurance. In doing so, Hooker articulated the degree
of uncertainty inherent in religious tradition as a socially existing reality
in ways that were conducive to a nondogmatic poetics such as Herberts.
Indeed, Hookers irenicism and nonpolemical rhetorical style are part and
parcel with his assumption that disagreement is a basic condition of eccle-
siastical and national life. In adopting such an attitude, Hooker developed
64
Van Geest, Incomprehensibility of God, 75.
65
Chretin, Under the Gaze of the Bible trans. John Marson Dunaway (New York: Fordham,
2015), 53.
66
My formulations here are inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral
Theory 2nd Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 222. What
Hooker may not have fully appreciated was the paradoxes involved trying to control the
framework of religious tradition while writing from within it. It would require a Shakespeare
to see that problem. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative,
and the Philosophy of Science, Monist 60.4 (October 1977), 453472.
67
See Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 145252 and The Anglican Moment? Richard
Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s in Anglicanism and the Western
Catholic Tradition (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2003), 90121. See also, Nigel Voak,
Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology.
94 G. KUCHAR
68
William Perkins, A Golden Chain (Cambridge: 1600), 478.
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 95
entry, and the citizenry. Unlike Herberts Bemerton flock, this was a
g
highly educated, powerful, and probably somewhat puritan group. The
potential for separatist dissent within such a group may help explain his
qualified defense of the ministry in The Fountain Opened. In defending
the ministrys pastoral role, Sibbes aims to establish the grounds for a
firm, broad, and peaceful fellowship, one consisting of spiritually revital-
ized believers who accepted the authority of the state church even as he
critiqued some aspects of it. In making his case Sibbes has several audi-
ences in mind, the two most obvious of which are dissenting puritans
and Laudian authorities. On the one hand, Sibbes stresses the importance
of the ministry as a sacramental stewardship in order to mitigate puritan
skepticism about the priesthood. But on the other hand, he makes sure
not to carry more water for the Laudian establishment than he must. The
result is a treatise that focuses on the inevitability of doubt and ignorance
in the pursuit of holiness with very little concern for spiritual security or
scriptural simplicity. Moreover, he stresses the importance of love as a
ground for Christian fellowship. Taken together, these emphases show
Sibbes discovering the most lyrical, social, and nondogmatic aspects of
reformed piety.
Unsurprisingly, Sibbes always treads carefully when criticizing fellow
puritans. At one point, for example, he softens his defense of the ministry
by grounding it on an oblique but unmistakable anti-Catholic premise:
Divine truths are mysteries; therefore they may not be published to people.
Nay, divine truths are mysteries; therefore they must be unfolded. Hence
comes the necessity of the ministry; for if the gospel be a mystery, that is,
a hidden kind of knowledge, then there must be some to reveal it. (5.469)
entered into a depth that he could not fathom, doth he cavil at it? No. Oh
the depth! Oh the depth! So in all the truths of God, when we cannot com-
prehend them, let us with silence reverence them, and say with him, Oh
the depth! Divine things are mysteries, the sacraments are mysteries. Let us
carry ourselves towards them with reverence. (5.465)
69
Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Penguin, 1977),
6970.
98 G. KUCHAR
70
W.K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (16031640)
(Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 358361, 446453.
71
C.J.Betts, Early Deism in France: From the so-called distes of Lyon (1564) to Voltaires
Lettres philosophique (1734) (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 31.
72
See Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), 385.
73
See Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England
(New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), 139.
THE CRITIQUE OFCERTITUDE INSEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 99
74
Harold R.Hutcheson, Lord Herbert of Cherburys De Religione Laici (New Haven: Yale
UP, 1944), 59.
75
King James I, Meditation Upon the Lords Prayer (1619), 10.
100 G. KUCHAR
living voice of God. From this standpoint, the uncertainties within tradi-
tion could give rise to further discovery which would in turn reinvigorate
the experience of divine mystery. Such a view allows for the idea that rev-
elation is a mystery in the sense that it is as an ongoing action developing
fresh and new discovries rather than an impenetrable assertion. Instead
of being a fixed set of propositions to which one must declare undying
allegiance, tradition was now increasingly being conceived as the context
in which personal and collective spiritual discovery could happen in the
course of time.
Needless to say, this view of tradition gave plenty of room for politi-
cal maneuver. James strategy at the Hampton Conference involved some
sleight of hand as he pitted moderate puritans against more extreme pre-
cisians, making relatively empty promises about further reform and dia-
logue.76 To this extent, the fragile peace of his church may have come to
rest more on the illusion of accommodation than its reality.77 But even that
was quite an accomplishment, bettering most of the likely alternatives, the
worst of which would be realized under his son Charles I.Faced with this
situation, Herbert had to avoid a number of pitfalls, including spiritual
blandness, mind-numbing fideism, radical doubt, or outright ecclesiasti-
cal cynicism. Doing so would require a supple exegetical ethos and a deft
capacity for balancing spiritual and theological tensions, including the ten-
sions between assurance and doubt to which we now turn.
Ibid.
77
CHAPTER 4
Two important poems in which Herbert deftly balances the desire for
spiritual confidence with the realities of doubt are Perseverance and
Assurance. In both lyrics, Herbert registers Andrewes concerns that
some early modern English Christians were grounding their sense of
assurance on bare repetitions of Pauline texts in which the Holy Spirit
is said to operate as an agent of certitude for those who are truly sons
of God. Worried about the dangers of presumption arising from a nar-
rowed reading of the Pauline epistles in which gospel wholly obscures law,
Andrewes preaches:
Gospel it how we will, if the Gospel hath not the legalia of it acknowledged,
allowed, and preserved to it; if once it lose the force and vigour of a law,
it is a sign it declines, it grows weak and unprofitable, and that is a sign it
will not long last. We must go look our salvation by some other way than
by Filius Meus Tu, if Filius Meus Tu (I say not be preached, but) be not so
preached, as Christ preached it; and Christ preached it as a law. And so much
for legem. (1.289)
Andrewes here rails against those who reduce the experience of saving
grace to a formula, to the idea that one can simply cry out to God on the
model of Romans 8:1516in order to know that one is saved: whereby
we cry, Abba, father. The spirit it selfe beareth witness with our spirit,
that we are the children of God.1 For Andrewes, too many protestants
in England confused spiritual adoption with presumption. In his view,
the result was a spiritually and exegetically reductive conception of faith
in which gospel was emphasized to the apparent exclusion of law, the
inadvertent result of which is a vicious return of the law upon the con-
science. Showing even greater pastoral sensitivity, Hooker, as we have
seen, thought that too many protestants suffered despair due to an unre-
alistically high expectation of joyful assurance. From this perspective, an
unchecked drive to certainty of salvation through faith alone inadvertently
generated spiritual despair and ecclesiastical conflict.
Herbert addresses these issues in his emotionally devastating lyric
Perseverance, which appears in the Williams Manuscript but not in the
final version of The Temple. Because Perseverance is almost universally
celebrated for its affective power, it is not immediately clear why Herbert
removed it from his final sequence. The most widely held explanation
is that the lyric expresses an unusually naked fear of reprobation, a fear
articulated most directly in stanza three when, as Louis Martz notes, the
speaker worries that his own sins may yet forbid the banns that might
announce his welcome to the marriage-supper of the Lamb.2 As Joseph
Summers concludes, the lyric most likely left out of the final version
because Herbert did not believe that it would turn to the advantage
of any dejected poor soul.3 Elizabeth Clarke confirms this view when
she describes the poem as unremittingly pessimistic. In her reading,
Perseverance dramatizes the unintended implications of Calvinist assur-
ance by showing the speaker in a desperate act of will, represented [in
the final stanza] as of someone clinging to the edge of a precipice by his
fingertips.4 In Clarkes account, the poem remains wholly ambiguous on
the question of perseverance, leaving us dangerously unsure of whether
the speaker is elect or not.
While I agree that Perseverance was excised for pastoral reasons hav-
ing to do partly with despair, I do not think it is unremittingly pessimistic.
Properly understood, the poem depicts a speaker who shows distinct signs
1
See also Andrewes, 5.337. For one example of this type of reduction, see John Forbes,
How a Christian man may discerne the testimonie of Gods spirit (Middleburgh: 1616), 6064.
2
Joseph H.Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (London: Chatto and Windus,
1954), 62; Louis L.Martz, Generous Ambiguity in A Fine Tuning ed. Maleski, 37.
3
Summers, George Herbert, 62.
4
Clarke, Theory and Theology, 7, 280.
ADOPTION, DOUBT, ANDPRESUMPTION: FROMPERSEVERANCE TOASSURANCE 103
5
Such theological open-endedness is not altogether surprising when we bear in mind that
Arthur Lake, a bishop who had acted as a consultant to the British delegation at the Synod
of Dort, was quite willing to leave the question of final perseverance unresolved. See Arnold
Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 382. Clearly, such open-endedness reflects cultural as well as liter-
ary exigencies.
6
For a discussion of the Barrett controversy and subsequent events, see Chap. 3.
ADOPTION, DOUBT, ANDPRESUMPTION: FROMPERSEVERANCE TOASSURANCE 105
who declare that no man can be certain of the forgiveness of his sins.7 If
Christians had faith in Christ and could call upon God with the confidence
that a child calls upon a loving parent, then they could be assured of justi-
fication through the ongoing presence of the Spirit.8 The opening stanza
of Perseverance assumes these associations when the speaker corrects his
mistaken belief that he is responsible for his prayer rather than the Spirit:
On the one hand, these lines are a humbling expression of the view that
the merit of prayer is not antecedent to grace. In making this point, how-
ever, the speaker somewhat awkwardly places responsibility for his lack of
inspiration at the feet of the Holy Spirit much as Herbert does in stanza
two of The Church-lock and key: I do lay the want of my desire, / Not
on my sinnes, or coldnesse, but thy will (78). Stanza one thus raises the
question of where the Spirits motions end and the human will begins or
as Andrewes asks in his sermon on Romans 8:26: When the Apostle saith,
The Spirit maketh intercession for us What groanings are these? are
they thine or mine? (5.339). In this respect, the opening stanza estab-
lishes the poems broader concern with the widely assumed connection
between spiritual motions and the perseverance of those adopted into
Christ.
By admitting that his prayer may be motivated by God rather than
himself, the speaker of Perseverance evokes St. Pauls claim that the
soul does not always know what is really happening at the moment of
prayer. According to Paul, the conscious intention of the mind is not nec-
essarily coincident with the intention of prayer itself because the Spirit
maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the minde of the Spirit,
because he maketh intercession for the saints, according to the will of
God (Rom. 8:2627).9 What is crucial at the moment of prayer is not
7
Luther, Babylonian Captivity, cited in Strier, Love Known, 307.
8
For a fuller discussion of this aspect of reformation thought, see Chap. 3 and Louise
Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?, 5758.
9
For Clarkes groundbreaking discussion of this passage in relation to Herbert, see Theory
and Theology, 165.
106 G. KUCHAR
that the soul understand everything which is happening in her and cer-
tainly not that her own words transparently express a holy intent. What
is important is that the will of God be realized through the motions of
the supplicants heart, a process that, as Thomas Goodwin explains in
his 1643 treatise, The Returne of Prayers, may be partly unconscious.
Following Augustine, Goodwin explains how prayer is often initiated by
a gracious pre-instinct, though unbeknown to them [who pray].10 John
Donne makes a related point in a sermon on Romans 13:7 when he para-
phrases St. Bernards assertion that God heares the very first motions
of a mans heart, which, that man, till he proceed to a farther consider-
ation, doth not heare, not feele, not deprehend in himself (4.310). As
Goodwin and Donne indicate, prayer often begins and ultimately unfolds
not in words but in heartfelt movements. Moreover, prayers mysteri-
ous origins sometimes lie in pre-instincts that can be more remote to
will and understanding than what Augustine calls the abyss of human
conscience.11 It is only later, upon meditative reflection, or at a subse-
quent, unforeseen moment within the prayer itself that the supplicant
may come to understand what was revealed by the divine will during the
act of prayer. From this perspective, prayer is more a mode of discov-
ery than a form of expression, a plummet sounding heavn and earth
(Prayer (I), 4).
In explaining the importance of listening for Gods answer to ones
petitions, Thomas Goodwin teaches his auditors to
observe if in the end God doth not answer thee still according to the ground
of thy prayer: that is, see if that holy end, intention, and affection, which
thou hadst in prayer, be not in the end fully satisfied, though not in the
thing thou didst desire: for God answers, Secundum cardinem, according to
the hinge which the prayer turnes upon.12
St. Augustine, Confessions. Loeb Classical Library. With an English translation by William
11
13
For a related discussion of prayer and spiritual motions in Herberts poetry, see Clarke,
Theory and Theology.
14
Rebecca Weaver, Prayer, Augustine through the Ages, 672.
108 G. KUCHAR
since we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit him-
self, says the Apostle, pleads for us with unutterable groanings What does
this mean: the Spirit himself pleads, unless to make one plead For it is
He of Whom the Apostle speaks in another passage: God has sent the Spirit
of his Son into our hearts, crying Abba, Father. And what does this word
crying mean except making one cry, through the use of that figure of speech
by which we call a day a happy one which makes us happy? And this he makes
plain in another place: Now you have not received a spirit of bondage so as to
be again in fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons, by virtue of
which we cry, Abba! Father! In that passage, he said crying, but in this one,
by virtue of which we cry, explaining clearly how he meant crying, that is, as
15
Ezekiel Culverwell, A Treatise of Faith. Seventh Edition. (London: 1633), 5051.
16
Augustine, De Dono Perseverantiae trans. Sister Mary Alphonsine Lesousky (Washington
D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1956), 128129; Calvin Institutes 3.80 cited in
George Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church : The Crisis of the Protestant Reformation (New
York: Harper, 1959), 105.
17
Sidney Gottlieb, The Two Endings of George Herberts The Church in A Fine
Tuning, 5776, 64.
ADOPTION, DOUBT, ANDPRESUMPTION: FROMPERSEVERANCE TOASSURANCE 109
I have already explained, making one cry. Thus we understand that this is
also a gift of God, that we cry to God with a sincere and spiritual heart.18
The cleverly sly tone of this childlike speaker becomes exquisitely wise by
the poems end:
a Christian soul that hath union with Christ, that hath a being and
station in him, may know it. There are always some pulses from this
heart. As we know there is some life by the beating of the pulses,
so Christs dwelling in the heart is known by these pulses. (5. 211)
ADOPTION, DOUBT, ANDPRESUMPTION: FROMPERSEVERANCE TOASSURANCE 111
But as Helen Wilcox notes, Several critics have observed that the first
line of next poem, The Bag, reveals that grace has intervened at lasthis
petition has been answered (512). The same dynamic occurs with respect
to Perseverance, which is followed in the Williams manuscript by the
ironically titled Death. This confidence is evident in Death right at
the outset and is then developed throughout the poem as a whole: Death,
thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing / But since our Saviours death
did put some bloud / Into thy face; / Thou art grown fair and full of grace
(1, 1316).19 The moderately confident assurance expressed in Death is
latent in Perseverance, indicating the motions of the Spirit in ways unbe-
knownst to the speaker. While Herbert does not literally have the speaker of
Perseverance cry out Abba! Father! he does what amounts to the same
19
The Williams Manuscript of George Herberts Poems: A Facsimile Reproduction With An
Introduction Amy M.Charles (Delmar NY: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977), 76.
112 G. KUCHAR
thing; he has him cry out unceasingly as a child to God in the expectation
that he will respond as a loving parent.
That this expectation of saving grace is not misplaced is implied in the
way the final stanza of Perseverance presents a kind of rebus, a visual
puzzle disclosing a verbal sign. As we have seen, the central image of the
concluding stanza involves an image of a child clinging to a parent who is
figured as a rock: my soule hangs on thy promisses (13). On the face of
it, the word hangs is hardly the likeliest verb here, certainly not as likely as
to cleave or to cling.20 For one thing, it connotes capital punishment.
But when read in the context of spiritual adoption, however, the words
negative connotations are negated by a biblical idiom in which trusting
God is figured as hanging upon him. Two central passages on assurance
in Isaiah are crucial here, the first being 32:17: And the worke of righ-
teousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and
assurance for ever (Isa. 32:17) and the second 30:15: In quietness and
confidence shall be your strength. In Hebrew, the word for quietness
(Shqat) signifies to hang upon something, and accordingly the meaning
is trust.21 In biblical Hebrew, then, to trust God is to hang upon him.
The implication of Herberts idiom is that the act of hanging upon God is
coincident with the experience of adoption and the assurance it engenders
both of which are the work of the Spirit.
But there is even more going on in the final stanzas carefully cho-
sen idioms. The most common metaphor reformers use to describe the
process of spiritual adoption is the Pauline figure of being engrafted into
Christ as in Donnes declaration that the spirit of adoption hath ingraffed
us into Gods covenant (5.102). When Herberts speaker says he hangs
upon Gods promises, he testifies to his having been engrafted into Christ
through the actions of grace. Just as God motioned him to pray and to cry,
so too does he support the very action of hanging. Not only is God with
him now, the conclusion implies, God has been with him from the start,
indeed from before the start. So, while the poems two final images of God
are in literal tension with one another, betraying the speakers lack of con-
scious assurance, their biblical idioms nevertheless suggest the unconscious
or pre-instinctual workings of the Spirit. The poems ending implies
that an experientially registered assurance may yet arrive but it has not yet
Institutes 3.2.31.497.
20
W.E. Vine, Vines Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words (Nashville:
21
come. Seen this way, the poem endorses a carefully modified form of prot-
estant perseverance, one that is modest, agonized, and implicit. In short,
this is perseverance without anything remotely resembling presumption.
Herberts Fouling-Peece
Herberts tempering of the kind of assurance associated with adoption
in Perseverance is further evinced in stanzas two and three. To start
with, these stanzas come very close to mooting the spiritual motions inti-
mated at the outset. In the second stanza, the speaker makes the mistake
of assuming full responsibility for the origins and significance of both his
prayer and his poems, asking what shall issue from my words (5, my
emphasis). His anxiety continues to register through shifting verb tenses
which are now exacerbated by an awkward repetition of conjunctions:
The anxiety that the speaker registers in his repetition of but three
times in four lines involves the distinction between a general rather than
a special witness of the Spirit, the idea that although the speaker believes
Christ saves he remains unconvinced of his own justification. John Forbes
explains this distinction in his 1616 treatise on How a Christian man
may discerne the testimonie of Gods spirit with reference to a preacher in
Herberts position, noting that such a man may bee a Preacher, and be
witnes of all the promises of God in Christ to others, & yet have no parte
in them him selfe.22 The danger of remaining in the state of general wit-
nessing is that it is no warrant of adoption.23 Read from Forbes stand-
point, Perseverance asks whether the speaker moves from a general to a
special witnessing of the Spirit, from an objective belief in Christs saving
power to a subjective persuasion that he enjoys the fruits of such power.
The speakers disturbing awareness that his own words may have unin-
tended effects is also expressed in stanza two through one of Herberts
most violent images. The speakers poem prayers are compared to a mis-
22
Forbes, How a Christian May Discerne, 17.
23
Ibid.
114 G. KUCHAR
firing gun that blows up in the shooters face, saving others but killing
oneself. The force of the aptly named fouling-peece rests, in part, on
an association going back to the patristic period of ejaculatory prayers
with darts.24 The suggestion here is that the poet is not even confident
enough to assume that his verse qualifies as what Donne describes in a
1620 sermon as weak prayers:
The words of man, in the mouth of a faithfull man are a Canon against
God himselfe, and batter down all his severe and heavy purposes for
Judgements. Yet, this comes not, God knows, out of the weight or force of
our words, but out of the easinesse of God. God puts himselfe in the way of
a shot, he meets a weak prayer, and is graciously pleased to be wounded by
that: God sets up a light, that we direct the shot upon him, he enlightens us
with a knowledge, how, and when, and what to pray for; yea, God charges,
and discharges the Canon himself upon himselfe. (3:152)
Where Donne situates God, Herberts poet situates himself. Where Donne
sees God as both the inspirer and the receiver of prayer, Herberts speaker
remains unsure about both the true authorship and the real significance
of his prayers. Assuming that the substance of his prayer remains his rather
than Gods, the poet inevitably worries that his prayers are self-destructive
rather than an Engine against the almighty (Prayer (I), 5). Ultimately,
Perseverance resolves these tensions by intimating several ways in which
the Spirit speaks through a poet who is in the throes of adoption.
24
For a discussion of this aspect of the word, see Clarke, George Herberts House of
Pleasure? Ejaculations, Sacred and Profane, George Herbert Journal, 19.12 (1996), 5571.
25
As William Perkins explains, adoption is co-extensive with justification and thus occurs
late in the experience of sanctification. See The Golden Chain or the Description of Theology
(London: 1591), Q2v.
ADOPTION, DOUBT, ANDPRESUMPTION: FROMPERSEVERANCE TOASSURANCE 115
for pastoral reasons, the issues at stake in the poem cannot be reduced to
despair alone. If the only thing preventing Perseverances inclusion in
the final version of The Temple were its despairing elements, Herbert could
simply have changed its title. Had he called the poem Adoption or The
Holy Spirit or Romans 8:15, he would have clearly pointed to the sal-
vific event depicted in the final stanza. But had he done so, he would have
made the poem an obnoxiously direct declaration of election.
Deeply sensitive to the Johannine principle that the Spirit blows where
it lists, Herbert took up the challenge of composing a poem about adop-
tion without making it an expression of security. In doing so, he avoided
the risks that William Perkins ran into when the Cambridge theologian
offered a formula for election wherein The judgment and discerning of
a mans own predestination is to be performed by means of these [eight]
rules which follow.26 In composing Perseverance, Herbert not only
worried about the pastoral problems posed by self-proclaimed reprobates
such as Francis Spiera but he also worried about overconfident reactions to
him such as those of Calvin and Matthew Gribalde.27 This is why the same
reticence about exaggerated certainty animating Perseverance is audible
in other poems that evoke the experience of adoption.
In Herberts most famous depiction of spiritual adoption The Collar,
the speaker hesitatingly concludes: Me thoughts I heard one calling,
Childe / And I replyd, My Lord (3536). The speakers response here
is an act of faith based on the hope that it is God speaking and that he is
being addressed with the spiritually consequential term child. The uncer-
tainty of this ending is even more pronounced than Augustines confusion
in Book 8 of The Confessions when he says that the voice which called out
tolle lege, leading him to fully convert, sounded as if (quasi) it were
that of a boy or a girl but ultimately he could not be sure. Uncertain of
the source and context of the phrase, Augustine nevertheless takes a leap
of faith and interprets the voice calling take up and read as a divine
injunction beckoning him to read holy scripture with renewed vigor. And
yet, the uncertainty and surprise of The Collars ending appears remark-
ably assured when compared with the bewildered and defensive speaker
of Dialogue. In this poem, the tortured speaker rejects being called
Child by Christ due to the excruciating burden that the atonement
places on him. He thus responds to Christs explanation I did freely part
26
Ibid., A4r.
27
For a discussion of the Spiera case, see Chap. 3.
116 G. KUCHAR
/ With my glorie and desert, / Left all joyes to feel all smart by abruptly
ending the conversation: Ah! no more: thou breakst my heart (2932).
Similarly, in Holy Baptism (II), the speaker wants to see himself as a
child in the eyes of God but it remains wholly petitionary: O let me still /
Write thee great God, and me a childe: / Let me be soft and supple to thy
will (68). In each of these poems, the experience of adoption is attended
by uncertainty, interpretive error, and the underlying but unarticulated
promise blessed are the poor in spirit. By also stressing these features
in Perseverance, Herbert sought to avoid the mutually implicating dan-
gers of presumption and despair, though he appears, in the end, to have
felt himself to have failed. To be sure, this lyric exemplifies the extent to
which theological substance in post-reformation England is inextricably
related to rhetorical and communicative style. While Perseverance is
not properly legible without reference to Augustinian notions of prayer
and adoption, what the poem finally gives us is an irreducibly personal
expression of a single man, at a particular moment in time, taking Richard
Sibbes advice to Hold God fast in the dark night, although we see noth-
ing Cast anchor in him (3.150).
Assurance
It may not be entirely true to say that Perseverance is the only poem
Herbert wrote in which the threat of reprobation is seriously entertained.
For it is precisely this spitefull bitter thought that brings the speaker
of Assurance into speech, giving the lyric its underlying, if slightly
muted, spiritual exigency. In this respect, the question the poem raises is
how the speaker manages to overcome the anxiety that is too terrible to
speak its name. According to Richard Strier, Assurance shows Herbert
gaining a sense of spiritual confidence through a rejection of covenant
theology. Instead of seeking affiance by examining himself for signs of
grace, the speaker, Strier argues, turns entirely to God through faith.28
There is good reason for seeing the poem as a reaction against some of the
more systematized approaches to conversion and sanctification evident in
covenant theology. After all, the speakers spitefull bitter thought was
triggered by the kind of gnostic desire that Andrewes mocks when he
criticizes this licentious touching, nay tossing [Gods] decrees of late; this
sounding the depth of His judgments with our line and lead, too much
presumed upon by some in these days of ours (3.32). The point is made
in line five of stanza one of Assurance:
In other words, the speakers fear that his league with God was
broke, or neare it arose because he tried to gain a sense of assurance by
understanding Gods ways through his own wit (11, 5). The implica-
tion here is that Herbert also sees some kinds of terrifying doubt as an
inadvertent consequence of the desire to gain total assurance by reduc-
ing Gods ways to a rationally conceivable plan. As with Hooker, despair
is diagnosed here as the flip side of presumption rather than its genuine
opposite. In this sense, Strier is entirely right to see Assurance as a reac-
tion against the way that some puritans trespassed on the mystery of Gods
ways. Nevertheless, he overstates the point when he says that the poem
wholly rejects the covenant idea.
Rather than rejecting covenant ideas, Herberts Assurance presents
a speaker coming to a proper notion of them. More precisely, the speaker
arrives at a view of the covenant that is broadly similar to Richard Sibbes
theory, especially the distinction between conditional and absolute prom-
ises that he stresses in his commentary on 2 Corinthians. Some promises,
Sibbes writes,
The idea that the covenant promise is conditional in its manner of pro-
pounding but absolute in its performance delimits and defines human
will without altogether annulling it, hence the highly qualified joint
action of this stanzas final line. At a strictly theological level, then, there
is no real contradiction between the covenant idioms of Assurance
and the deficiency of the human will lamented in Ungratefulnesse.29
Similarly, what we see in Assurance is a less histrionic balancing of
grace and human will than the one expressed in the final stanza of
Perseverance. This is partly because Assurance leans more cau-
tiously on Gods role in the process but without, at the same time,
wholly effacing human action and will.
Concomitantly, there is no suggestion in Assurance that faith cannot
be strengthened through the experience of sanctification, something both
Calvin and the poems final stanza permits, though in slightly different
ways.30 What is emphasized in the poem is not the question of resting in
God rather than relying on ones own personal sanctification; instead, its
exigency arises from the dangerously intimate relation between despair and
the forms of assurance that are dependent on mans wit which Andrewes
often attacks. This emphasis is affirmed in the poems final stanza:
29
For a discussion of Ungratefulnesse, see Chap. 2.
30
See Calvin, Institutes 3.14 sections 1820, pp.78586 particularly as cited and discussed
in Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 12501550: An Intellectual and religious History of
Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980), 378. See also Calvins
commentary on 1 John 3:14 Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to The Hebrews
trans. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, n.d.), 217218, especially as discussed in
Pitkin, What Pure Eyes Could See, 88. As we saw in the last chapter, Herbert, like Calvin, takes
it for granted that the pledges of Gods Love are visible to Christians. See The Country
Parson, 283.
ADOPTION, DOUBT, ANDPRESUMPTION: FROMPERSEVERANCE TOASSURANCE 119
The proverbial bone imagery of the final stanza returns us to the ante-
cedent scenario alluded to in stanza one: the systematization of Gods
ways through human wit for the sake of total assurance rebounds back
in the form of despair and doubt. In this sense, the speakers shame
lies in his having trespassed on a divine mystery that Gods love nev-
ertheless overcomes. Instead of resting on his own efforts of wit and
unsanctified will, he turns to 1 John 1317 and the assurance of Gods
love promised there.31 Like Andrewes, Herbert roots the experience
of assurance not just in Pauline concepts of faith alone but also in the
Johannine idea that divine love manifests in the human soul through
fellowship and spiritual intercourse with God, hence the affirmation of
a qualified form of reciprocity between man and God in the final two
lines: What for it self love once began, / Now love and truth will end
in man (3742). This Johannine emphasis on the reciprocal dynamics
of love between the soul and God modifies the strong Pauline emphasis
on faith alone in the poems penultimate stanza. Here again, Sibbes
offers a helpful parallel:
Can a man know Gods love in Christ incarnate, and Christs suffering for
us, and his sitting at the right hand of God for us, the infinite love of God
in Christ, and not be carried in affection back to God again, in love and joy
and true affiance, and whatsoever makes up the respect of godliness? It can-
not be. (5.461)
31
For a related reading of Assurance to which I am very much indebted, see Cefalu, The
Johnnanine Renaissance, Chap. 4.
120 G. KUCHAR
1
For important discussions of the more positive side to Herberts reading of Valds, see
Clarke, Theory and Theology, 179223, and Ilona Bell, Herberts Valdsian Vision, ELR 17
(1987), 303328.
2
See The Publisher to the Reader in The Hundred and Ten Considerations of Signior
John Valdsso (Oxford: 1638; rpt. John Lane: NewYork, n.d.), xxiiiiv.
3
Daniel A. Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance: The Life of Juan de Valds (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2008), 5, 106.
4
Ibid., 154. See also Massimo Firpo, Juan de Valds and the Italian Reformation trans.
Richard Bates (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 123176.
5
See J.N.Bakhuizen van den Brink, Juan de Valds: rformateur en Espagne et en Italie
15291541 (Genve: Librairie Droz, 1969), 95 and Firpo, Juan de Valds, 140.
6
Jos C.Nieto, Juan de Valds And the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformation
(Genve: Libraire Droz 11 Rue Massot 1970), 5154 and Firpo, Juan de Valds, 6. The fol-
lowing paragraph derives mostly from Nieto.
HERBERT, SCRIPTURE, ANDFELLOWSHIP 125
Greek New Testament. It was within this scholarly context that Valds
developed an exegetical style that has been celebrated for its objectivity
and modernity. In his exegetical work, Valds applied recent developments
in scholarship to penetrate into the meaning of the biblical text and bring
out the results in a brief, sober, and objective manner.7 His concern was
with the objective meaning of scripture independent of his own subjec-
tivity, hence his refusal to sacrifice the grammatical meaning of the text
in favor of pious mystical allegory.8 This exegetical approach arose from
Valds assumption that the bible is not a verbally inspired or divinely dic-
tated book but an expression of the right concepts about God, by men
who had been moved by the Spirit.9 Working from these assumptions,
he concluded that scripture is not always the word of God for me.10
Instead, it is a work that provides information on questions of ethics that
is true in the same way in all times, places, and persons.
Valds combined this scholarly approach to scripture with a very strong
sense of the Holy Spirits role in the individual Christians life. Scholars
have traced this spiritualist aspect of his piety to the so-called Alumbrados
movement of early sixteenth-century Spain.11 A Spanish word meaning
Enlightened ones, the term Alumbrados denotes a complex spiritual phe-
nomenon which stressed the importance of personal experience through
the motions of the Holy Spirit oftentimes at the expense of ecclesiastical
authority, scripture, and tradition. In 1559, the Dominican theologian
Melchor Cano identified the unorthodox dimensions of this movement
when he observed that unlike Lutherans who deduced the certainty of
grace from faith, they deduced it from a feeling of experiencing the faith
and the love of God, which they deluded themselves to be feeling.12
Combined with a rather modest view of scriptures inspiration, this aspect
of Valds spirituality worried not only the Spanish Inquisition but also the
leaders of the Genevan Reformation. In a letter dated 2 September 1566,
the ministers of Geneva, led by Theodore Beza, criticized a pastor of the
French Church at Emden for publishing a Flemish translation of Valds
Considerations. According to the letter, Valds work swarms with many
7
Nieto, Juan de Valds, 195.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid., 253.
10
Ibid., 254.
11
See Nieto, Juan de Valds 5660 and Firpo, Juan de Valds, 516.
12
Explained and cited in Firpo, Juan de Valds, 16.
126 G. KUCHAR
errors and even blasphemies against Gods sacred word.13 The ministers
general concern was not that Valds was too Roman Catholic, but that his
evident privileging of spiritual motions over scripture looked suspiciously
Anabaptist.
Although Beza published a more positive assessment of Valds in his
1580 work Icones, celebrating him and Vermigli for their reforming work
in Naples, concern about the more radical dimensions of the Spaniards
thought lingered into the seventeenth century.14 In his 1648 anti-sectarian
work A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist, Samuel Rutherford warns that
Valds provides the grounds and poysonable principles of Familisme,
Antinomianisme, Enthusiasme, for he rejecteth the Scriptures, [and] mag-
nifieth Inspirations.15 Responding to the positive reception of Valds
among civil war sectarians, Rutherford restates Herberts basic criti-
cisms of Considerations in more sharply polemical language. In particular,
Rutherford shares Herberts concern with Valds reducing of scripture
to just so much information and the antinomian spiritualism attendant
upon it. For Herbert, however, dogmatism and rationalism are not only
dangerous because they take the form of social movements threatening
Christians from the outside. More subtly, they are dangerous because they
embody spiritual and interpretive postures that protect oneself from mor-
tifying affliction, the spiritual suffering attendant upon sanctifying change.
Ultimately, Herbert did not see the threat posed by Valds as isolated
to the antinomian or Anabaptist fringe. More significantly, he saw it as
an inherent tendency arising from within the modern scriptural tradition,
hence the sharpness of his critique.
Herberts concerns with Valds are initially broached in the prefatory
letter to Ferrar. While congratulating Ferrar on his translation of a valu-
able treatise, Herbert nevertheless indicates that there are some things
which I like not in him (304). Once having voiced such concern, he
notes that the treatise is nevertheless worth publishing for three eminent
things observable therein (304). First, the treatise is of historical interest
as a proto-protestant work written in the midst of popery (304). Second,
Valds gives great honour and reverence to Christ, an observation that
rightly notes the Christocentric nature of Valds anthropology. Third,
Herbert admires Valds pious rules for the ordering our life (3045).
13
The letter is given as Appendix IV in van den Brink, Juan de Valds, 11213.
14
See Nieto, 15 and Massimo, 197208.
15
Rutherford, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist (London: 1648), 164.
HERBERT, SCRIPTURE, ANDFELLOWSHIP 127
These words about the H. Scripture suite with what he writes elsewhere,
especially Consid. 32. But I like none of it, for it slights Scripture too much:
holy Scriptures have not only an Elementary use, but a use of perfection,
and are able to make the man of God perfect, 2 Tim. 3. (306)
All the Saints of God may be said in some sence to have put confidence in
Scripture, but not as a naked Word severed from God, but as the Word of
God: And in so doing they doe not sever their trust from God. But by trust-
ing in the word of God they trust in God. (3067)
The basic problem Herbert diagnoses is that Valds nullifies the Words
power to generate ongoing significance in the life of the individual believer.
Valds kills off the Spirits inspiration of the living Word by wrongly pre-
supposing that the bibles horizon of expectation can be reached and
even surpassed. This is why Herbert later claims that the gospel is ever
outrunning the Teacher (310), ever surpassing both priest and layman
alike. In emphasizing this dimension of scripture, Herbert echoes Saint
Gregorys assertion that the Word advances with those who read it
thereby sustaining the pro nobis principle so central to orthodox reforma-
tion hermeneutics.16
At stake in Herberts critique of Valds is nothing less than the ontol-
ogy of scripture. In it he asks if the bible is a story that circumscribes one
within its ever-receding frame, making the Christian believer more like a
character in an evolving story than a subscriber to a philosophy or con-
stitutional charter. In other words, does the bible continue to function
as a book of mysteries? Or is it better understood as a book of promises
that one can take possession of once and for all? Is it essentially dynamic,
According to Herbert, Valds does not allow for the idea that biblical
revelation speaks to individual believers over the course of their lives in
varying contexts. He thus worries aloud that without a view of scripture
as a story in which one is a character moving toward but never fully reach-
ing perfection, Christianity leaves room for nothing but catechizing
and Enthusiasmes (310). In other words, if the Word can be learned
as though it were no different than an alphabet, then all that is left for
Christianity, Herbert worries, are propositional statements of the sort one
finds in catechisms or, worse yet, the nonsensical delusions of fanatical
visionaries moved by the Spirit. For Herbert, Valds exemplifies some
of the most reductive aspects of post-reformation scriptural hermeneutics.
Reacting to Valds abuse of Holy Scriptures (309), Herbert
makes an important distinction between two major features of biblical rev-
elation, its doctrines and its promises. In the scriptures, Herbert explains,
are {Doctrines, these ever teach more and more. [And] {Promises, these ever
comfort more and more. Rom. 15.4 (310). Crucially, for Herbert, these
two dimensions of scripture do not have equal standing. As he explains,
the use of the Doctrinall part, is more, in regard it presents us not with
the same thing only when it is read as the promises doe, but enlightens
HERBERT, SCRIPTURE, ANDFELLOWSHIP 129
there are innumerable places, containing in them great mysteries, but yet
either so inwrapped with a cloud, or so darkened with umbrages or height-
ened with expressions that God may seem to have left them as trials of
our industry, and arguments of our imperfections, and incentives to the
longings after heaven.17
Writing in the wake of the civil war, Taylor sees the complexity and
mystery of scripture as providing the occasions and opportunities of our
mutual charity and toleration to each other and humility in ourselves,
rather than the repositories of faith, and furniture of creeds, and articles
17
Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works in Ten Volumes (London: Longman, 1862), 5.410.
130 G. KUCHAR
for there is in very many scriptures a double sense, a literal and a spiritual
and both these senses are subdivided. For the literal sense is either natural or
figurative: and the spiritual is sometimes allegorical, sometimes anagogical;
nay, sometimes there are divers literal sense in the same sentence.21
What is even worse for those eager to fix the divine Word into one mean-
ing is the realization that there is no infallible rule for determining whether
a passage is literal or figurative in the first place.22
Perhaps most disconcerting for those in search of certainty is the spiritual
disposition required for proper exegesis. Following the same Augustinian
tradition that Sibbes extends, Taylor assumes that there is no ultimate dis-
tinction between the subjective state of readers and the significance they
derive from scripture. The two are intimately co-related precisely insofar
as there are some secreta theologiae, which are only to be understood by
persons very holy and spiritual.23 Given this interpenetration of reader and
Ibid.
18
Ibid., 411. For the limits of Taylors irenicism vis--vis the state of emergency, see
19
The Authour doth still discover too slight a regard of the Scripture, as if it
were but childrens meat, whereas there is not onely milk there, but strong
meat also. Heb. 5. 14. Things hard to bee understood. 2 Pet. 3.1.6. Things
needing great Consideration. Mat. 24. 15. (317)
Ibid., 421.
24
that Herbert stresses. Avoiding the standard claim about biblical simplicity,
Herbert quotes scripture in order to make the point that the bible possesses
Things hard to bee understood and Things needing great Consideration.
As Herbert implies, the word consideration deployed here and in Valds
title is a relatively technical term referring to a process of combined medita-
tion and prayer.26 The implication of Herberts critique is that scripture is
the site of ongoing, prayerful, meditation rather than information-transfer.
More than simply read, the scriptural text must be lived in order to be
understood.
What emerges from Herberts response to Valds is a palpable con-
cern that a particular mode of reading scripture was at risk of being over-
shadowed in seventeenth-century Europe. According this vision, the bible
confers meaning upon believers in a way that is difficult to control or
know in advance precisely insofar as the story of revelation includes read-
ers within its unfolding narrative structure.
James Boyd White, This Book of Starres: Learning to Read George Herbert (Ann Arbor:
29
Miles Smith warns that scripture is not a pot of Manna, or a cruse of oil,
which were for memory only, or for a meals meat or two, but as it were a
shower of heavenly bread sufficient for a whole host, be it never so great
(n.p.). The speakers limitations are further conveyed by his huckster-like
cry of a barker or street vendor: Ladies, look here; this is the thankfull
glasse (8).30 The tone here sharply contrasts Augustines more austere
depiction of scripture as a mirror [that] is held out to you. See whether
you are one of the pure-hearted it mentions, and grieve if you are not yet
like that; grieve in order to become so. The mirror will reflect your face to
you (19.110).31 So, while it is probably too much to say that the praise
Herberts speaker utters is distorted and mistaken from the beginning,32
his focus remains largely on the letter and thus the promissory dimen-
sion of scripture. This association of the bibles promise with its letter pre-
vents Herberts speaker from falling prey to an overly deadening view of
scripture, something he further avoids by asserting that scripture cannot
be praised too much as though its strange delights were incalculable.
The description of scripture changes significantly in sonnet two. Now
images of payment and ambassadorial message-bearing evolve into images
of light and illumination. Rather than describing scripture as though
it were a medicine that one could take once and be done with, The
H.Scriptures (II) describes it as a light that continually shows the way.
Yet, the limited understanding of scripture as a book of promises still lin-
gers in the first stanza of sonnet two as the speaker hopes to grasp how
all of scriptures parts unite into one totalizing whole. This is the basic,
Valdsian error that the poem will eventually correct:
30
The term huckster is John Drurys, Music at Midnight, 9; the terms barker and street-
vendor are Whites, This Book of Starres, 164.
31
This and other patristic articulations of the idea of scripture as mirror are discussed in
Chretin, Under the Gaze of the Bible, 622.
32
White, This Book of Starres, 164.
HERBERT, SCRIPTURE, ANDFELLOWSHIP 135
ciled with the whole. This view, however, obscures the extent to which
the bible discloses the living Word of God as its ethical and spiritual teach-
ings are overshadowed by its soteriological promises. The turn toward
this insight occurs when the speaker reorients his perspective in order to
accommodate the view that scripture is a sacramentum in which one par-
ticipates even before it is a promise that one receives. In other words, the
speaker begins to appreciate the extent to which the Logos has an onto-
logical as well as an historical dimension; it is a Being in which one moves
as well as an event to which one must respond.33 Without such a dynamic
view of scripture, reading can devolve into a legalistic, closed-ended activ-
ity in which meaning becomes a predictable matter of obtaining informa-
tion rather than a surprising process of discovering oneself anew.
This widening of perspective occurs in the third quatrain of The
H.Scriptures (II) with the introduction of the term secrets, a close syn-
onym of Pauls mysteria:
33
For a brief explanation of the distinction between the Word as Being and the Word as
Deed, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Luthers Works, 56:54.
136 G. KUCHAR
Vaughans astrological figure suggests that the bibles meaning is like the
point of the ecliptic, or degree of the Zodiac, which at any moment
is just rising about the eastern horizon.34 The implication here is that
Christians are immanent participants within the scriptural narrative not
transcendent observers of it.
Behind Herberts and Vaughans astronomical figures lies the theo-
logical tradition of describing scriptures skopos, its goal, aim, tar-
get, design, or method with the navigational sighting of a star for
the sake of orientation. As Margaret ORourke Boyle explains, the term
skopos acquired this particular theological valence in Erasmus, especially
his Enchirdion. For the Catholic reformer, the true astrotheologian
does not gawk at pagan deities frozen into constellations like Cynosura
[Ursa Minor]. He fixes on Christ alone because Christ is the fixed-sign
or praefixum signum that orients the spiritual life.35 Intriguingly, Herbert
and Vaughan avoid this association of scriptural skopos with a fixed
sign (7677). Once it becomes clear that scripture confers ongoing
and dynamic meaning, the analogy between the bible and constellations
at the beginning of The H.Scriptures (II) diminishes in significance.
Acknowledging the limitations of his astronomical analogy, the speaker of
The H.Scriptures (II) arrives at a view of the bible as a medium in which
one moves as well a series of unfolding messages to which one should be
responsive. He realizes that Starres are poore books, & oftentimes do
misse: / This book of starres lights to eternall blisse (1112). The impli-
cation here is that scripture is not only a guide but also a path, not only, or
even primarily, a specific set of directions or regulations but more crucially
a spiritual orientation or relatively open-ended way. Herbert thus drops
the idea that the bibles skopos can be compared with astronomical forms
of sighting precisely because they imply a somewhat fixed or predictable
mode of reading. If the bible lets in future times, as Herbert says in
The bunch of grapes, it does so in a way that is unpredictably dynamic
(bunch of grapes, 13) from the standpoint of the first-person reader.
Herbert makes much the same point in The Temper when he describes
the Holy Spirit as a power who suddenly dost raise and race / And evry
day a new Creatour art (The Temper (II), 78). As these lines imply, the
34
OED Cited in Martz, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986),
534.
35
Marjorie ORourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1977), 81.
HERBERT, SCRIPTURE, ANDFELLOWSHIP 137
Spirit not only destroys and makes new on a quotidian basis, but it also
runs ahead, blazing fresh and new discovries, hence the repeated redis-
covery in The Temple that the speaker is behind, before, and within the
Word. For example, when he regretfully says in The Reprisall though
I die for thee, I am behind (3), he stumbles on an insight that is repeat-
edly rediscovered throughout the whole of The Temple. The movement
between the two H.Scriptures poems encapsulates this sequence-long
process of assimilating and being assimilated by the Word.
The spiritual and exegetical movement that takes place between The
H.Scriptures (I) and (II) in The Temple also occurs within single poems,
most notably perhaps The bunch of grapes. This lyric exemplifies
Herberts sense that reading scripture is concomitant with misreading it.
The common, even perhaps inevitable, mistake that the speaker makes
involves the legalistic error of assuming that one can freeze Gods Word
in place, as though its medium were stone rather than voice, visual image
rather than living Spirit. This mistaken desire for interpretive control gives
The bunch of grapes its spiritual and exegetical exigency. The poem
stages a crisis of reading in which the desire for spiritual fixity gives rise
to a reductive understanding of scripture as a closed-ended text in which
everything is predictably laid out beforehand. In this way, the poem
depicts how scriptures saving and sanctifying power can devolve into an
abstract and deadening letter when Christians expect to possess gospel
without law and joy without affliction. For Herbert, as we have seen, the
life of grace lies in fully embracing strife rather than hoping that one might
be exempted from suffering.
The spiritual and interpretive crises played out in The bunch of grapes
are evinced earlier in The Temple when the speaker of The Temper asks:
While the sentiment here is admirable, the idioms are askew. The desire
to engrave God is potentially idolatrous, a point that is further conveyed
when the word engrave is echoed in the speakers feeling that though
138 G. KUCHAR
the world is too small for God it remains A grave too big for me (12).
The same mistake is repeated in the following poem of the same title
when the speaker asks God to fix [his] chair of grace so that he might
be reduced to human control and domination (2, 9). This immature
tendency to equate divine love with emotional stasis recurs throughout
The Temple, giving rise to poems such as The Glimpse which begins:
Wither away delight? / Thou camst but now; wilt thou so soon depart,
/ And give me up to night? (13). In each of these poems, the desire
for stasis intimates a defensive posture against the mortifying force of the
Word as law.
In these moments of psycho-spiritual defense, Herbert diagnoses the
tendency among Christians to enjoy the grace of gospel without the jus-
tice of law that Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Sibbes both warn against.
In a 1623 Nativity Sermon at Whitehall, Andrewes, as we have already
seen, critiques those who downplay the importance of law so as to accen-
tuate the experience of assurance under grace, declaring:
We had well hoped, Christ would have preached no law, all Gospel He. That
He would have preacheddown the old Law, but not have preached up any
new. We see it otherwise. A law He hath to preach, and preach it He will
If we love not to hear of a law, we must go to some other Church; for in
Christs Church there a law is preached. (1.287)
Gospel it how we will, if the Gospel hath not the legalia of it acknowledged,
allowed, and preserved to it; if once it lose the force and vigour of a law, it is a
sign it declines, it grows weak and unprofitable, and that is a sign it will not
long last. We must go look our salvation by some other way than by Filius
Meus Tu, if Filius Meus Tu (I say not be preached, but) be not so preached,
as Christ preached it; and Christ preached it as a law. And so much for
legem. (1.289)
In other words, the desire for the gospel without the law is an inadver-
tent form of legalism; it reduces the dynamic interplay of Word and Spirit
that is of the very essence of scripture as a living presence, thereby making
HERBERT, SCRIPTURE, ANDFELLOWSHIP 139
Here the critique is leveled at those who are not rigorous enough in
their self-analysis, letting themselves off the hook too easily. So, rather
than identifying exessive optimism with carnal Gospellers (5.58) as
Andrewes does, Sibbes identifies it with those who are spiritually lazy.
Always careful to avoid polemic with fellow protestants, Sibbes balances
his implied critique of nonpuritan conformists by admitting: It is danger-
ous, I confess, in some cases with some spirits, to press too much and too
long this bruising, because they may die under the wound and burden
140 G. KUCHAR
before they be raised up again (1.47). For Sibbes, Where most holiness
is, there is most moderation (1.57). His ultimate concern in The Bruised
Reed, however, is with the overemphasis on saving grace which is the
cause oft of relapses and apostasies, because men never smarted for sin at
the first; they were not long enough under the lash of the law (1.44). In
his view, Weakness with watchfulness will stand out, when strength with
too much confidence faileth (1.86).
Like the misguided efforts to render Gods revelation statically unchang-
ing that Andrewes warns against, the speaker of The bunch of grapes
confesses to having tried to lock up Joy. Having not spent enough time
under the lash of the law, the speaker now finds himself undergoing
the kind of relapse that Sibbes diagnoses in The Bruised Reed. Herberts
speaker begins:
What is important here is not only what he says, but the position of pre-
sumed transcendence from which he thinks he says it. Rather than being
fully immanent within the scriptural narrative (on the journey that it out-
lines), the speaker presumes that he is temporally behind the Word while
nevertheless remaining exegetically ahead of it. The illusion here lies in his
assumption that he can fully comprehend his spiritual state from a third-
person point of view, a position that ultimately nullifies the conditions of
hope and faith, thereby giving rise to either presumption or despair. By
adopting this attitude, the speaker makes the same type of mistake dis-
closed in the final lines of Miserie, where an ostensibly objective account
of mans miseries turns out, rather shockingly, to be a first-person narra-
tive: Now he is / A sick tossd vessel, dashing on each thing; / Nay,
his own shelf: / My God, I mean my self (73, 7778). And yet, despite
his interpretive presupposition of transcendence, the speaker of The
bunch of grapes nevertheless complains that he is penned in and by the
Word, claustrophobically impaled by it to use a startling image from The
Church-porch (21). The expectation of constant joy has engendered an
interpretive attitude in which the divine Word is fixed in place resulting in
a sense of alienation from God. In a terrible reversal of expectation, the
speaker achieves the stasis he desired but in the opposite way he had hoped.
The crisis explored in The bunch of grapes arises from the speakers
wrongheaded expectation to be in a constant state of emotionally legible
assurance by enjoying the fruits of gospel without the thorns of law. In this
respect, the poem dramatizes the dangers of adopting an overly objective
view of scripture in the spiritually opposite way that Self-condemnation
does. If The bunch of grapes exposes how unrealistic expectations of
constant joy can give rise to spiritual deadness, then the speaker of Self-
condemnation warns against spiritual pride and self-conceit. In both
cases, however, readers are warned against assuming that they know what
significance scripture may hold out for them. As the speaker of Self-
condemnation warns
So good is God, that in the worst estate he gives his children matter of
rejoicing in this world. He gives them a taste of heaven before they come
there. He gives them a grape of Canaan, as Israel. They tasted of Canaan,
what a good land it was, before they came thither. So Gods children, they
have their rejoicing. St Paul sweares and protests it, 1 Cor. xv. 31, By our
rejoicing in Christ Jesus I die daily. As verily as we joy in all our afflictions,
so this is true that I say, that I die daily. (3.206)39
See Chap. 2.
38
39
Daniel Doerksen makes a related point with reference to Sibbes in Conforming to the
Word, 131. For a parallel passage in Andrewes, see 3.161.
HERBERT, SCRIPTURE, ANDFELLOWSHIP 145
In the penultimate stanza, the speaker has not yet assimilated the full
force of Pauls paradox as he still feels caught within the grip of a dead-
ening law. Although his interpretive stance has broadened to include the
tension between gospel and law, he has not yet fully avowed its saving or
sanctifying effects.
These effects do not begin to register until the final stanza when the
speaker achieves his first fully mature articulation of the tension between
Moses and Christ, justice and mercy. At this point, the speaker arrives at a
rather humble and hesitating epiphany:
For the first time in the poem, law discloses gospel; hence the speakers
first-person response to Christs sacrifice for my sake. This shift from the
alienating our of the penultimate stanza to the my of the final line marks
the point at which the speaker starts to become a living character within the
Christian story, one who is no longer penned down by a deadening letter.
In other words, the speaker now comes to see that the law is not against
the promises of God (Gal. 3:21) but operates as the law of Christ
(Gal. 6:2), the spiritual law (Rom. 7:14). By tasting the wine made from
the laws sour-sweet juice, the speaker demonstrates a lived-understanding
of the Pauline idea that the fulfillment of the law comes through those
who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit in faith
(Rom. 8:3). Furthermore, Herberts phrasing in the final stanzas opening
question recalls Andrewes teaching in his 1623 Easter Day sermon that in
the winepress of Isaiah 63, Christ was Himself trodden and pressed; He was
the grapes and clusters Himself, thereby o ccasioning the year of redemp-
tion [which] is already come, and is now (3.70; 3.78). In other words,
Andrewes preaches what Herberts speaker slowly discovers.
For many critics, the ending of The bunch of grapes feels forced and
unpersuasive. There is perhaps something too intellectual, too unemotional
about it, as if the speaker were arguing himself into joy.40 But Herbert, we
See, for example, Vendler, 191, Cited in Wilcox, 448; and Strier, Love Known, 159.
40
146 G. KUCHAR
should remember, was aware of the danger of being argud into hopes
(Affliction, 15). When this happens in Affliction, it occurs because his
thoughts reserved / No place for grief or fear (1516) as he deluded
himself into thinking that the state of grace excludes suffering. This is
exactly where we were at the beginning of The bunch of grapes when
the speaker assumed that joy can be defined in the negative through a lack
of shame, sin, and law. In this respect, the speakers spiritual crisis flowed
from a blinkered view of what Herbert elsewhere calls true Christian joy
(Self-condemnation 8). As Herbert reminds us in The Invitation,
true Christian joy is not to be confused with commonsense notions of
pleasure or peace. Unlike conventional notions of happiness, Christian joy
involves an eschatological dimension that transcends earthly happiness:
The bunch of grapes, the speaker does not move from affliction to joy
but from an unrealistic and immature view of joy as a permanent state of
happiness to a recognition that Christian joy is an eschatological phenom-
enon that can coincide with sorrow, grief, and tribulation. These paradoxes
recall Herberts parable poem Peace, particularly the speakers realiza-
tion that although Christ sweetly livd; yet sweetnesse did not save / His
life from foes (256). As these lines intimate, true Christian peace does
not involve anything as nave as exemption from suffering, hence Christs
teaching in John: These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye
might have peace, in the world ye shall have tribulation (16:33).
What is perhaps most striking about The bunch of grapes is the way it
depicts a spiritual crisis as a crisis in reading. The resolution to its conflict,
incomplete as all such resolutions necessarily are, comes when the speaker
arrives at a more mature understanding of the relation between faith and
joy through a specific kind of figural interpretation of the Old Testament.
He rediscovers, for himself, the typological link between the cluster of
grapes in Numbers to the messianic prophecy of the grape press in Isaiah
and thus to Christ in the gospels.42 Applying these typological patterns to
himself at this specific moment of spiritual pain, he rediscovers the con-
tinuity in difference between the law of Moses and the law of Christ. By
trying to lock-up joy, the speaker of The bunch of grapes inadver-
tently locked himself out of the promissory dimension of scripture, thus
making the error Paul warns against in Galatians: Is the law then against
the promises of God? God forbid (3:21). As Luther often warned, this
is what happens when scripture is perceived entirely as a set of command-
ments summoning the faithful to action. But in Herberts poem, this crisis
is implicitly initiated by the opposite, more antinomian, error of suppress-
ing law. In The bunch of grapes, the speaker is driven into speech by an
overconfident expectation of constant joy and the felt-experience of ever-
present grace. Given the poems initiating crisis, the hesitating tone of its
ending is entirely appropriate. After all, Herberts challenge in the poem
is to provide a resolution that avoids the triumphalism that instigated the
crisis in the first place. Instead of unmitigated hope, the speaker comes
to learn with Sibbes that Joy enlargeth the soul, but grief straitenth it
(7.341). Ultimately, the speaker rediscovers that Christological joy is not
42
For a fuller articulation of these biblical allusions in the poem, see Bloch, Spelling the
Word, 141146.
148 G. KUCHAR
reading, suggesting a degree of false assurance on his part, the voice who
corrects him speaks in a calmly authoritative manner with feet firmly on
the ground. Such use of tonal variation is one of Herberts major contri-
butions to the religious lyric as a genre. In this instance, Herberts shifting
tone suggests that he clearly understood that the resonance of someones
voice often reveals whether they deeply believe and fully understand what
they are saying or not, a principle all good country parsons and psycho-
analysts presumably know.
We are now in a position to observe a slight but significant difference
between Herberts The bunch of grapes and Sibbes theology of joy.
For Sibbes, Christological joy
Unlike the more puritan Sibbes, Herbert rarely, if ever, speaks of any
particular state of the soul as permanent, even one that is not, strictly
speaking, affective in nature. In Peace, for example, he locates repose in
Christ who is mysteriously figured as the grain from which bread may
be made (see 3742). In this respect, Herbert follows Hookers insight
that oftentimes despair arises from a misapprehension of the nature of
faith as a permanent emotional condition. Indeed, the following passage
from Hookers The Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect per-
fectly captures the implied backstory of The bunch of grapes. According
to Hooker,
an error groweth, when men in heaviness of spirit suppose they lack faith,
because they find not the sugared joy and delight which indeed doth accom-
pany faith, but so as a separable accident, as a thing that may be removed
from it; yea there is a cause why it should be removed. The light would
never be so acceptable, were it not for that usual intercourse of darkness.
(3.474)
It is exactly the sugared joy and delight that the speaker of Herberts
poem finds lacking at the outset. Misconstruing this new emotional state
as a sign of Christs absence, the speaker finds himself in a state of spiritual
and interpretive crisis.
150 G. KUCHAR
Ultimately, the speaker of The bunch of grapes finds his way back
into the promissory dimension of scriptural narrative by reopening the
channels of sacra doctrina, thereby rediscovering that faith, in its Pauline
essence, is the condition for the receipt of righteousness.44 For Herbert
such a condition enables Christians to rejoice in the midst of tribulation. It
is precisely this ability to joy in tribulation (and not an abstract theological
problem) which provides the exigency for The Water-course:
{
Life
For who can look for lesse, that loveth Strife. (15)
This is the dilemma that the ending of The Banquet answers when
Herbert encourages his readers to take up my lines and life and to
Hearken under pain of death, / Hands and breath so as to Strive in
this, and love the strife (512, 54). From this perspective, Christological
joy is the very opposite of stasis; it is the wisdom of knowing how to
take moments of affliction as the occasion of mortification that Herbert
describes as characteristic of the Christian Soldier in The Parson
Condenscending (284). By situating worldly strife within the eschato-
logical and hermeneutic context of faith, Christians can face up to the
impenetrable mystery that concludes The Water-course, the mystery
that God
{ Salvation
gives to man, as he sees fit Damnation. (10)
Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church, 260 and Hunt, Art of Hearing, 39.
45
152 G. KUCHAR
As with his poetry, the end of this chapter moves in a surprising direc-
tion as he roundly qualifies the idea of the parsons being full of all
knowledg.47 By the end of the chapter, Herbert stresses the necessarily
collective and interpersonal nature of the pursuit of truth within the con-
text of an evolving Christian fellowship:
46
Christopher Hodgkins situates Herbert in relation to a distinctly Calvinist view of
learned ignorance in Authority, Church, and Society 1216. While there are important conti-
nuities between this context and Herberts work, there are also, as Prior has subsequently
shown, significant spiritual and ecclesiastical differences.
47
Ronald W.Cooley makes much the same point in Full of all knowledg: George Herberts
Country Parson and Early Modern Social Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2004), 47.
HERBERT, SCRIPTURE, ANDFELLOWSHIP 153
as one Countrey doth not bear all things, that there may be a Commerce;
so neither hath God opened, or will open all to one, that there may be a
traffick in knowledg between the servants of God, for the planting both of
love, and humility. Wherefore [the Parson] hath one Comment at least upon
every book of Scripture, and ploughing with this, and his own meditations,
he enters into the secrets of God treasured in the holy Scripture. (229)
of most proud and most dangerous temptations of this kind and think rather
that the Apostle Paul himself, although prostrated and taught by the divine
and heavenly voice, was nevertheless sent to a man that he might receive the
sacraments and be joined to the church.48
48
On Christian Doctrine trans. D.W. Robertson Jr. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1958), 5.
154 G. KUCHAR
Ibid., 6.
49
Conclusion: TheFlower
As the Latin poem just prior to On spots and stains suggests, Herbert
diagnosed his age as one of diminishing fellowship. Adopting the
European-wide perspective he takes in Church-rents and schismes,
Herbert addresses his audience in the prophetic tone that he would later
adopt in The Church Militant:
51
Anthony Trollope, The Warden (London: J.M.Dent & Sons Limited, 1957), 175.
156 G. KUCHAR
By this point in The Temple, we know that the paradise which the
proud forfeit is the capacity to rejoice in affliction, what Vaughan calls,
in a slightly different context, our transplanted paradise (Sone-days,
11). What the ending of The Flower does not refer to is Gods final
judgment, of which the speaker knows he knows nothing. According to
the diagnosis carried out in the poem, the danger of pride is that it con-
stitutes a kind of psychological and interpretive clenching, an attempt to
hold oneself still, strong, and secure even in the face of the Words over-
whelmingly transformative power. A common ailment of intellectuals like
Herberts speaker, this defensive posture is finally overcome in the loose,
HERBERT, SCRIPTURE, ANDFELLOWSHIP 157
1
For Cherburys subtle relation to deism, see R.D.Bedford, The Defence of Truth: Herbert
of Cherbury and the seventeenth century (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1979).
2
For discussions of the intellectual background to Cherburys work, see Louis I.Bredvold,
Deism before Lord Herbert Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 4
(1924), 431442; Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought
of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1934), 125138;
Harold R.Hutcheson ed. and trans., Lord Herbert of Cherburys De Religione Laici (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1944), 384; and C.J.Butts, Early Deism in France. For the stoic origins of
Cherburys ideas, see Book II Sections 4345 of Ciceros The Nature of the Gods.
3
For a sustained assessment of Cherburys irony, see Eugene D. Hill, Edward, Lord
Herbert of Cherbury (Boston: Twayne, 1987). See also Bredvold, Deism Before Lord
Herbert, 433.
4
The authorship debate about this work seems to have been settled in favor of his having
penned it. See Bedford, A Defence, 189.
5
Richard Baxter, Animadversions On De Veritate (London: 1672), 168.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 161
Posterity has largely agreed with Cherburys view that his most important
work was his 1624 treatise De Veritate. By no later than 1714, On Truth
was seen as the major forerunner of English deism, specifically the radically
unorthodox idea that true religious knowledge was best gained through
reason rather than scripture.7 At bottom, De Veritate was an attempt to
overcome the simultaneous and often mutually implicating rise of Calvinist
fideism and Pyrrhonist skepticism. The books primary aim is audible in its
subtitle, which indicates that it shall differentiate Revelation, Probability,
Possibility, and Error in order to establish a sure method for arriving at
truth. Despite ostensible enervations to the contrary, Cherbury includes
religious truth within the compass of his analysis. This philosophical proj-
ect places Cherbury near the center of a European-wide effort to provide
some kind of infallible method for arriving at certain knowledge above and
beyond that given through historical faith or ongoing spiritual revelation.
As with related philosophical efforts, Cherburys project was designed to
provide a way of avoiding religious schism which, as ambassador to France
(16191624), he saw culminate in what would become the Thirty-Years
War. This ecumenical effort is expressed in many of his works, including
his 1649 history of Henry VIII, commissioned by Charles I, as well as his
autobiography, first published by Horace Walpole in 1764. In his history
of Henry Tudor, Cherbury interrupts his narrative to assert that a ratio-
nally grounded religion based on commonly shared ideas dispose[s] us
to a generall Concord and Peace, a point he reiterates while telling his
own life story.8 At the heart of Cherburys thought lies the dream of such
concord and with it a general contempt for religiously motivated conflict.
6
Fredrick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality In the Early
English Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), 132.
7
See Thomas Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh: 1714).
8
Edward Herbert, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (London: 1649), 296
and The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury ed. J.M. Shuttleworth (London:
Oxford UP, 1976), 2425, 2931.
162 G. KUCHAR
9
For a discussion of Herbert and Cherbury in their tense familial context, see Jeffrey
Powers-Beck, Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP,
1998), 119164.
10
Cited in Margaret Bottral, George Herbert (London: Murray, 1954), 18. See also De
Religione Laici, ed. Hutcheson, 20. According to John Drury, who sees more similarities
than differences in the spiritualities of the two Herberts, most of [De Veritate] was written
in England with his brother George to hand, Music at Midnight, 103.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 163
11
Charles Lyttle, Lord Herbert Apostle of Ethical Theism Church History 4.4 (1935),
247267, 254.
12
Hill, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 28.
164 G. KUCHAR
13
Edward Herbert, The Poems of Lord Herbert of Cherbury ed. John Churton Collins
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1881; rpt. 1970), xxxviii.
14
Edward Herbert, Life of Edward Herbert, 31.
15
See John Drury, Music at Midnight, 311.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 165
and thus genuine fellowship arises. Without the priority of faith over rea-
son, mystery, in Augustines sense, disappears, and with it fellowship as he
defined it.
We can set Cherburys critique of mystery in its proper context by
observing how he obscured a crucial dimension of Augustines defini-
tion of the faith/reason dialectic. Augustine, we must recall, does not
simply claim that faith precedes reason in the realm of revelation or reli-
gious belief; instead, he argues that a basic element of nonverifiable trust
undergirds the whole of human life generally. In the realm of human rela-
tions, Augustine thought, reason is largely helpless without trust because
so much of life cannot be known on a first-hand basis. At almost every
step in human experience we implicitly rely on others, so much so that
we are mostly unconscious of it. This basic condition of human life leads
Augustine to the view that in the absence of unverifiable trust, relations
among humans are not, in principle, humane.
The phrase Augustine uses to describe the implicit condition of faith
in one another which human beings must assume is sacramentum amoris.
For Augustine, the mystery of love denotes the condition in which a com-
munity qua community lives and moves, be it a family, a group of friends,
or a church. He makes this point in On Faith in Things Unseen when he
envisions what a community composed of members who only believe what
they know through first-hand observation would actually look like. His
point is that any genuine community presupposes faith in things unverifi-
able by observation as a condition of its own possibility. According to
Augustine,
If this faith in human affairs is removed, who will not mark how great will
be their disorder and what dreadful confusion will follow? For, who will be
cherished by anyone in mutual charity, since love itself is invisible, if what I do
not see I ought not to believe? Friendship, then, will wholly perish, since it
rests upon nothing more than mutual love. What of this will one be able to
receive from another, if it shall be believed that nothing of it can be shown?16
16
Augustine, On Faith in Things Unseen trans. Roy Joseph Deferrari and Mary Francis
McDonald in The Fathers of the Church Vol 4. (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1947),
454.
166 G. KUCHAR
though corrupted in the course of centuries, must in the last resource rest
on the knowledge or understanding of the author from whom the belief
originated. So here, too, knowledge precedes and confirms belief. (315)
17
On this point, see Augustine, Letter 120, in Saint Augustines Letters Volume 2 trans.
Sister Wilfrid Parsons (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1953),
300316.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 167
Cherburys Scripture
Because Cherburys privileging of common notions over revelation runs
the risk of rendering scripture superfluous, he is forced in De Veritate to
repeatedly say what would normally go without saying, such as: Faith in
the sacred records is not abolished or disparaged by these considerations.
With the greater part of mankind I fully accept these accounts (315).
Similarly, at one moment he insists that while knowledge is perpetu-
ally refreshed by the spring waters of the Common Notions, and faith is
18
I heard the Cambridge-based philosopher Edmond Wright use the phrase reason in
trust in a closely related context. For Wrights Nietzschean account of faith in productive
fictions, see Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith (New York: Palgrave, 2005), Ch. 6.
19
Halyburton, Natural Religion, 24.
168 G. KUCHAR
ourished by miracles, the whole inner man is stirred to life by this Book,
n
the bible (316). Yet, moments later he demurs: The miracles which have
been invented to establish some new and often unworthy belief or dogma
have always seemed to me to suggest imposture: in the same way I have
always had respect for any law or religion which is supported not by mir-
acles but by virtue (316). As these passages suggest, his most orthodox
statements have a peculiar way of betraying highly unorthodox implica-
tions. Almost every time he endorses scriptural revelation, he qualifies or
even undermines the claim with a subsequent comment. Read closely, he
clearly privileges intuitive reason and personal spiritual experience over
biblical authority. Hence his assertion that under the guidance of the
inner consciousness I maintain that the principle of good actions spring
from Common Notions or the divine wisdom within us (311). The par-
allels between this and Juan de Valds must have deeply struck George
Herbert. Like the Spanish reformer, Cherbury reduces scripture from a
book of mysteries to an ethical treatise, preferring the authority of his
own private experience over supposed miracles disclosed to others in the
ancient past. In doing so, he set the stage for the broader reduction of
religion to morality that occurred in the eighteenth-century tradition of
pragmatic rationalist Christianity.
By grounding his philosophical edifice on common notions rather than
revelation, Cherbury marginalized scripture in an even more profound
way than Valds. One of his most revealing attempts to soft-pedal the
unorthodox dimensions of his thought occurs in De Religione Laici where
he responds to criticisms of his approach to scripture. Intriguingly, some
of these criticisms appear to have originated with his younger brother
George, who is perhaps vaguely alluded to here:
But those of our country may say that I ought to speak more eloquently
of the Holy Scriptures. To whom I reply that no one thinks more nobly of
them, for I have asserted strongly that the best laws for living rightly and
happily, or eternally, are delivered in the Scriptures. (129)
But if carelessness or the or the passage of time has allowed to creep into a
sacred or profane book any passage which maligns God or calls in question
those divine attributes which are universally recognized, why should we not
agree either to amend the workand this has been done beforeor to charge
its interpreters with error, in that they have departed from the writers mean-
ing and even from the analogy of faith, since they have stated views which
conflict with Common Notions? (316)
the salvific promise of scripture, its pointing the way toward Heaven
for him personally. In this way, Herberts poem focuses on a feature of
Christian faith that remains irreducible to reason, including the vaguely
generalized common notion 5 which states that the virtuous are rewarded
and the guilty punished after death. Few of Herberts poems more effec-
tively convey the sense in which scripture is a mysteriously living presence
than Heaven. Simultaneously comforting and beguiling, Heaven
neatly emphasizes precisely those aspects of scripture which Cherburys
philosophy elides, particularly the idea that it is the Viva Vox Dei:
Silence, space, and breath reverberate in the tension between these two
voices, especially through the circulation of aspirates and assonance. The
effect is to convey presence as much as to bear meaning. Both palpable and
ineffable, the voice of Echo somehow feels near and far at the same time.
It intimates the living presence of the Holy Spirit speaking through the
leaves of scripture as a voice that is neither fully exterior nor interior but
something else entirely. Through the tight restrictions of the echo form
and in a mode that is as elusive as it is simple, Herbert neatly expresses
the view that the believing Christian is a living participant in a scriptural
narrative that is dialogical and surprising. Particularly significant is the
play between abide and bide, which suggests that Echos story continually
endures. All of this contrasts with Cherburys Echo, which appears in
his lyric as an internal voice rather than a scripturally mediated spirit. As
Jeffrey Powers-Beck observes, Cherburys poem suggests that the place
for confession is not limited to any church built of clay or stone or living
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 171
Much more than a bare set of laws or moral principles, scripture appears
in the poem as a living presence whose persevering light shows the way
toward heavenly bliss in all of its senses. Given that he is now writing in
the context of last things, Herbert pushes the meaning of Christian joy
to the furthest limits of language. Throughout the poem as a whole, but
especially in its final lines, Herbert somehow manages a tone that is com-
forting and estranging at once.
The difference between Cherburys blunter, more obvious ending and
that of Heaven is instructive. Cherburys Echo in a Church concludes:
21
Powers-Beck, Writing the Flesh, 145. The inset quote is from De Veritate 303304.
172 G. KUCHAR
in lieu of the still small voice that Elijah hears in 1 Kings which would seem
more appropriate here. In any event, Herberts poem does not construe
scripture as a collection of predicate statements that one can follow like
a map of physical space. Instead, it is an abiding presence receding into
and then back out of silence. Read in the wider context of The Temple,
Heaven shows Herbert intimating the spiritual limitations and herme-
neutic reductiveness of Cherburys religion.
The Agonie
As Heaven confirms, George Herberts poetry routinely emphasizes the
spiritual consequences involved in degrading mysteries into problems, of
turning a relationship or living presence into a riddle one might solve once
and for all. In at least two closely related poems in The Temple, Herbert
addresses these issues thematically, speaking to them directly rather than
implicitly as he does in Heaven. The first is The Agonie and the second
is Divinitie. In both, the threat of Cherburys rationalism can be felt.
The Agonie begins by claiming that natural philosophical problems
can be fully measured while religious mysteries involve matters so personal
that they may be infinitely sounded without ever being fully grasped. The
poem begins by setting two types of mysteries against one another. On
the one hand, there are the mysteries of nature and statecraft. And on the
other, there are the scriptural mysteries of Sin and Love, both of which are
capitalized so as to indicate that they are not reducible to objects or things
in the world. Adopting the tone characteristic of Old Testament wisdom
literature, Herbert teaches:
while in the second it implies to put into metre (OED, 16). The second
meaning of measure is verified by the word sounding, which implies
singing and searching rather than tracing and weighing. Herbert thus
warns against overly literal readings of scriptural uses of the word measure
in much the way Calvin does in his commentary on Isaiah 40:12, which
Herbert is partly glossing. The passage from Isaiah reads: Who hath
measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven
with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and
weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? According
to Calvin,
When [God] names measures, which are used by men in very small Matters,
he accommodates himself to our ignorance; for thus does the Lord often
prattle with us for his greatness far exceeds all creatures, so that heaven,
and earth, and sea, and all that they contain, however vast may be their
extent, yet in comparison with him are nothing.22
22
Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker Books,
2009), 8:218.
23
The Minor Poems of Joseph Beaumont (16161699) ed. Eloise Robinson (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 11.
174 G. KUCHAR
as Arthur Bury and John Toland. Also important is Cherburys claim that
revelation must recommend some course of action which is good; in
this way genuine revelations may be distinguished from false and wicked
temptations (308). The implication here is that revelation cannot sus-
pend the ethical values embodied in the common notions; they can only
reinforce them. Ignoring the implications of this claim for stories such as
Abraham and Isaac, Cherbury applies it to the Decalogue. In his view,
the ten commandments simply authorize the previously known common
notions since their injunctions are implicit in every kind of law and reli-
gion (312). In the beginning, Cherbury claims, was not the Word as
event but intuitive, universal reason.
As I have noted, this logical displacing of revelation behind common
notions forecloses the interpretive space in which standard Augustinian
notions of mystery operate. If everything crucial in scripture can be
reduced to a set of reasonable and predictable propositions, then the kind
of interpretive commitment demanded by participatory exegesis is either
beside the point or simply a means of reinforcing what is already known.
Cherburys reduction of participatory exegesis, which is precisely the kind
of development that Andrewes warned against, would become more fully
explicit later in the century in works such as Arthur Burys The Naked
Gospel (1690). Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, Bury presented a disqui-
sition on the meaning of mysterion that wholly rejected the type of mystery
faith articulated by Browne, Donne, and Herbert. Rather than defining
Christianity as an extended mystery, as Sibbes did, Bury asks incredulously:
You say, Religion hath Mysteries; let us therefore consider what a Mystery is.
In the Old Testament we find not the word; in the New, we find it consist
in two parts; the one Open, the other Secret.25
The crucial point comes when Bury sharply qualifies this standard defini-
tion by adding:
So the word plainly importeth two contrary Aspects upon two different
Persons; hid to the one, and open to the other: But that it should at the
same Time, and to the same Persons, be both hid and open, is more than a
hidden Mystery; it is an open Contradiction, and it is no less so, that I must
believe what is hidden from my understanding.26
Ibid., 5657.
26
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 177
27
Ibid., 56.
28
Toland, Christianity not Mysterious, 86.
178 G. KUCHAR
Divinitie
If one poem in The Temple errs more on the side of certainty than mys-
tery, it is Divinitie, the lyric most closely associated with The Agonie.
The two poems form a kind of diptych, with one emphasizing wonder
and the other confidence. John Drury recognizes this when he suggests
that Divinitie mocks mystery-mongers and complexity-lovers.30 Yet,
Divinitie itself is not a straightforward poem. Taken as a whole, it is an
exquisitely beguiling dramatic monologue in which claims to scriptural
simplicity are made in difficult to understand ways. The result is a poem
29
For a discussion of the new theology, see Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Thologie and
Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009).
30
Drury, Music at Midnight, 108.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 179
31
Judith L.Kovacs, 1 Corinthians: Interpreted by Early Medieval Christian Commentators
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 71.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 181
First in the doctrine of them; and so they are hid to them that are out of the
church. And then, secondly, in the spiritual meaning of them; and so they
are hid to carnall men in the church. And then, thirdly, in regard of the
full comprehension of them, as they are indeed; and so they are reserved for
heaven. We have but a little glimpse of them, a little light into them in this
world. (4.165)
Even more directly, Herberts paradox recalls Luthers claim that the Holy
Scriptures are a spiritual light far brighter than the sun itself, e specially in
things that are necessary to salvation.32 As we have seen, this is a standard
idiom used to express the play of revelation in concealment presupposed
by Augustinian hermeneutics and hence by Herberts understanding of
poetic neatness.
33
George Herbert The Temple: A Diplomatic Edition of the Bodleian Manuscript (Tanner
307) With Introduction and Notes by Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton: MRTS, 1995),
203.
34
Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1983), 145.
35
Augustine paraphrased by Henri de Lubac in Theological Fragments trans. Rebecca
Howell Balinski (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 67. John Hales, Sermon Concerning
The Abuses of obscure and difficult places of holy Scripture (Oxford: 1617), 4.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 183
36
Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2013), 121.
184 G. KUCHAR
Come, O madman, not leaning on the thyrsus, not crowned with ivy; throw
away the mitre, throw away the fawn-skin; come to thy senses. I will show
thee the Word, and the mysteries of the Word, expounding them after thine
own fashion Come thou also, O aged man I give thee the staff [of the
cross] on which to lean O truly sacred mysteries! O stainless light! My
way is lighted with torches, and I survey the heavens and God; I become
holy whilst I am initiated.38
37
For the rise in popularity of Ante-Nicene fathers among seventeenth-century English
clergymen, see Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The
Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 9,
79.
38
Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Heathen in The Ante-Nicene Fathers
Volume 2 trans. and ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson with notes by A.Cleveland
Coxe (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994), 204.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 185
But yet, as clear as it is, it [godliness] is a Mystery, a Secret; not that I cannot
see it, but that I cannot see it with any eyes that I can bring: not with the
eye of Nature: Flesh and blood has not revealed this unto thee, sayes Christ to
Peter: not with the eye of Learning; Thou hast hid these things from the wise,
sayes Christ to his Father nor with the eye of a private sence for
no Scripture is of private interpretation. I see not this mystery by the eye of
Nature, of Learning, of State, of mine private sense; but I see it by the eye
of the Church, by the light of Faith, thats true this Church is that which
proposes to me all that is necessary to my salvation, in the Word, and seals all
to me in the Sacraments. (3.9.210)
39
Strier, Love Known, 47.
40
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici in Sir Thomas Brrowne: The Major Works ed.
C.A.Patrides (New York: Penguin, 1977), 66.
41
Robert Sanderson, XXXVI Sermons (London: 1689 8th edn.), 485.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 187
I.
2.
It is a signe
though wantest sound Intelligence;
If that Thou think
thy selfe to understand the Sence.
42
Traherne responds respectfully but critically to Twisse in A Sober View of Dr Twisses his
Considerations in The Works of Thomas Traherne Volume 1 ed. Jan Ross (Cambridge:
D.S.Brewer, 2005), 45230.
188 G. KUCHAR
3.
Bee not deceived
Thou then on it in vain mayst gaze
The way is intricate
that leads into a Maze.
4.
Heers nought but whats Mysterious
to an understanding Eye:
Where Reverence alone stands Ope,
And Sence stands By.
43
Thomas Traherne, Centuries, Poems, And Thanksgivings ed. H.M.Margoliouth (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1958), 2.205.
LORD CHERBURY IN THE TEMPLE: FAITH, MYSTERY, AND UNDERSTANDING 189
44
This is the main thesis of Peter Harrisons, Religion and the Religions in the English
Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990).
190 G. KUCHAR
1
See respectively Strier, Love Known; Richard Todd, The Opacity of Signs: Acts of
Interpretation in George Herberts The Temple (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1987); and Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination, 98126.
good by his slips, which is a strange course to make a man better by. Saith
St. Austin, I dare say, and stand to it, that it is profitable for some men to
fall; they grow more holy by their slips (3.137). So although Augustines
insights into the potentially productive dimensions of error emerge against
the background of the felix culpa motif, they remain irreducible to it.
More important in this context than the felix culpa principle is
Augustines broader concern with learned ignorance. Throughout his
poetry, Herberts speakers continually rediscover that there is no predict-
able or even repeatable means by which one can fully understand the living
Word. In The Temple, the process of spiritual discovery remains irreducible
to methdologization; there is no systematic means of arriving at a spiritual
epiphany. Although the habits of faith are crucial for religious life, they do
not guarantee any sort of sanctifying insight.2 In this sense, the learned
ignorance that T.S.Eliot said is inherent to the act of writing poetry very
much applies to Herberts spiritual aesthetic. As far as poetry goes, Eliot
says in East Coker, Every attempt Is a wholly new start each venture
a new beginning and all a different kind of failure.3
Rather than being a doctrinal thematization of the felix culpa motif,
Herberts appropriation of Augustines concept of blessed error is part
of a larger hermeneutic vision in which the experience of understanding is
concomitant with nonunderstanding, truth with error. In many respects,
Herberts fascination with Augustines blessed error has more in com-
mon with William Empsons fortunate confusion than it does with
Ambroses happy fault.4 For Herbert, authentic understanding often
happens in excess of human willing or expectation as the event of truth
arises through various forms of misunderstanding and the experience of
mortal limitations attendant therein. On this account, it is in the nature
of spiritual and hermeneutic experience to reverse ones expectations, shift
ones perspective, and thereby change ones heart. Even more, though,
Herbert often assumes that the experience of holy mystery is concomi-
tant with the experience of being in error, much as he assumes that the
act of reading scripture is coincident with misreading it. The result is a
spiritual aesthetic in which the experience of being in error, so i nevitably
2
See, for example, Sibbes 1.47.
3
T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays 19091950 (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1971), 128.
4
See Empsons fifth type of ambiguity in Seven Types of Ambiguity (Chatto and Windus,
1930 rpt; NewYork: Penguin, 1995).
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 193
5
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 28.
6
Neal W.Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia Press, 1960), 66.
7
For a discussion of Ramus influence on Bacon, see Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery
and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974), 4147, 5253. For Ramus
possible influence on poetry, see Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery:
Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1947), Chap. 12.
8
Walter Ong, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958), 287.
194 G. KUCHAR
9
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 2nd Edition. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G.Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2002), 348350, 356.
10
For an informed discussion of Herberts relation to Bacon, see Miller, George Herberts
Holy Patterns, 77118.
11
On The Trinity 15.2 as cited in Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2.193.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 195
Helen Wilcox has identified a crux in the word showls from line two, not-
ing that it is difficult to reconcile with the surrounding metaphors of fire
(heat, burn, flames) (4). The missing context here is alchemy as the
coexistence of fire and water in sonnet one is a hermetic expression of the
spiritual refinement associated with martyrs who, by this definition, reach
a state in which opposites are united. Herberts imagery emphasizes the
traditional idea that a martyr is first and foremost a fully realized spiritual
soul bearing witness to the truth and only secondarily a sacrificial victim
of the Christian faith. This distinction is crucial because it occurs in the
context of Herberts allusion to the alchemical poetics of the poet-martyr
Robert Southwell. The only other English poet to have dedicated him-
self entirely to devotional verse, Southwell looms large in The New Year
Sonnets as a significant precursor.12 While the highly popular Southwell
used alchemy as a mildly veiled code for recusant experience and post-
Tridentine theology, Herbert now uses it to redefine poetry in light of
Augustines spiritual aesthetic.13 In dedicating his poetic talents to the
greater glory of God, as he says in the letter in which the sonnets were sent
12
For discussions of Herberts nonalchemical echoes of Southwell in these sonnets and the
letter in which they first appeared, see F.E.Hutchinson, the Works of George Herbert (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1959), 549550 and Gary M.Bouchard The Roman Steps to the Temple:
An Examination of the Influence of Robert Southwell, SJ, upon George Herbert Logos 10.
3 (2007), 131150, 138139.
13
For a discussion of Southwells alchemical poetics, see my Alchemy, Repentance, and
Recusant Allegory in Robert Southwells St Peters Complaint in Remapping Early Modern
English Catholicism ed. Lowell Gallagher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010),
Chap. 7.
196 G. KUCHAR
14
Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1998), 42.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 197
But the general point here is essentially the one Richard Sibbes makes
when he says that the Grace of God is a blessed Alcumist, where it
toucheth it makes good, and religious.15 Consistent with the alchemical
fire imagery of its opening, sonnet one ends with a prayer complaint that
poets be purified with the love of divine fire: Why doth that fire, which
by thy power and might / Each breast does feel, no braver fuel choose /
Than that, which one day, Worms, may chance refuse (1214).
Sonnet two concludes on a similar note, except now Herbert draws
out the spiritual and aesthetic consequences of his key distinction between
sacred and profane verse. In doing so, Herbert participates in a long tra-
dition of employing alchemy as a way of expressing the transformative
power of verse.16 He does this by declaring that true beauty lies not in
physical form but in the spiritual process of sounding God. Stating his
case somewhat baldly, the teenaged Herbert concludes sonnet two by dis-
tinguishing the attractions of the female muse from the everlasting beauty
inherent in the process of seeking Gods love. In the process, he confirms
the view expressed in an anonymous seventeenth-century alchemical trea-
tise which declares that God is the true Alchymist [who] excludes all
vulgar operations to extract internal beauty17:
15
Cited Stanton J. Linden Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from
Chaucer to the Restoration (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996) 93. See also
Strier, Love Known, 208.
16
For studies of how alchemy inflects early modern poetics, see Lynn Veach Sadler,
Relations Between Alchemy and Poetics in the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century, With
Special Glances at Donne and Milton Ambix 24.2 (1977), 6976 and Peggy Munoz
Simonds, Love is a spirit all compact of fire: Alchemical Coniunctio in Venus and Adonis
in Emblems and Alchemy eds. Alison Adams and Stanton J. Linden (Glasgow: Glasgow
Emblem Studies, 1998), 133156.
17
An anonymous seventeenth-century alchemical treatise cited in Linden, Darke
Hieroglyphickes, 251.
198 G. KUCHAR
18
See, for example, Clement of Alexandrias, Stromata, 532.
19
Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity & Identity in Shakespeare and
Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 99, 107, 130132.
20
Doerksen, Picturing Religious Experience, 189.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 199
The New Year Sonnets give us our first glimpse of how Augustines theory
of discovery would prove crucial to Herberts view that spiritual transfor-
mation and aesthetic beauty are inextricably related phenomena. Later in
his career, Herbert would adapt Augustines ideas of error into his broader
21
Cited in Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2.193.
22
Cited in Heather A.R. Asals, Equivocal Predication: George Herberts Way to God
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 62.
23
See Louis Dupre, Passage to Modernity: An Essay on the Hermeneutics of Nature and
Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993), 3234.
200 G. KUCHAR
spiritual aesthetic recognizing, all the while, the close relation among
error, discovery, beauty, and mystery in Augustines thought.
From early philosophical texts such as Answer to the Skeptics and De
Ordine, to mature works such as On The Trinity and The City of God,
Augustine remained deeply preoccupied with the experience of being mis-
taken. Augustines practice of parsing the various ways in which human
beings err was partly occasioned by his desire to counter the radical skepti-
cism espoused by members of the Second Academy. Seeking to refute the
Pyrrhonist view that we do not have access to any certain truths, including
even the truth of our own existence, Augustine arrived at the Si fallor,
sum principle which he expressed in The City of God this way: I have no
fear of the arguments of the Academics. They say, Suppose you are mis-
taken [that you exist]? I reply If I am mistaken, I exist. A nonexistent
being cannot be mistaken; therefore I must exist, if I am mistaken.24
This proto-Cartesian refutation of radical skepticism suggests one way in
which error can be an aspect of knowledge rather than simply a veering
from it. Resting his rebuttal of skepticism on the idea of a philosophically
productive mistake, Augustine confronted the inherently limited nature
of human understanding without relinquishing claims to truth. While
acknowledging that human apprehension is structured by our finite per-
spective, Augustine nevertheless shows how understanding can happen in
and through the experience of error.
If The City of God identifies intellectually productive forms of erring,
then his Enchirdion interrogates the ethics of error. In a chapter wholly
dedicated to the problem, Augustine encourages his readers to avoid error
whenever possible while nevertheless acknowledging that there are points
on which ignorance is better than knowledge.25 Tellingly, Augustine com-
municates this point by turning from the third-person standpoint of philo-
sophical abstraction to the first-person stance of biographical narration:
It has happened to myself to take the wrong road where two ways met, so
that I did not pass by the place where an armed band of Donatists lay in wait
for me. Yet I arrived at the place whither I was bent, though by a roundabout
route; and when I heard of the ambush, I congratulated myself on my mistake,
and gave thanks to God for it. Now, who would not rather be the traveler who
made a mistake like this, than the highwayman who made no mistake?26
24
St. Augustine, City of God trans. John OMeara (New York: Penguin, 1984), 11.26.460
25
St. Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love ed. Thomas S.Hibbes (Washington
D.C.: Regnery, 1996), 19.
26
Ibid.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 201
In this example, momentarily losing ones way nevertheless serves the pur-
pose of truly finding it. As a result, Augustines destination is reached in a
manner that utterly transforms his perspective on where he has been and
thus where he has truly arrived. Given the hermeneutic implications of this
process, it is perhaps no surprise that Augustine returns to this anecdote in
his major discussion of scriptural interpretation.
In Book One of his treatise on biblical exegesis On Christian Doctrine,
Augustine argues that the first-person ethical application of the text is
an inherent part of scriptural understanding rather than a specific type
of reading. Instead of being an activity that follows upon interpretation,
the application of scripture to ones life is thought to be concomitant
with interpretation itself. This idea is captured in the figure of scripture
as mirror commonly expressed in medieval literature which we saw in
H.Scriptures (I). As St. Gregory the Great writes, The Holy Scripture
offers itself to our soul like a mirror. We can contemplate in it our inner
face.27 The same principle attaches to the claim made by another medi-
eval commentator that it is not man who explicates Scripture, but
rather man uses Scripture to explain himself to himself, so as to surpass
himself.28 From this Augustinian perspective, all understanding of scrip-
ture is in a very broad sense a mode of self-understanding. For the text to
be understood, there must be an interpenetration of reader and text. To
test whether this interpenetration has occurred properly or not, readers
need to consider if their interpretation has engendered charity or caritas.
The contrast with Edward Herbert now comes into full relief. For Lord
Cherbury, readers can test the validity of scriptural interpretation against
the objectivity of the five common notions, a move that effectively nulli-
fies the spiritual dimension of biblical reading that Augustine assumes is
fundamental. For Augustine, interpretation of scripture is true if it brings
divine love into the world. And as we have seen, such acts of reading are
said to provide the kind of assurance central to the Johannine tradition,
assurance through the manifestation of love among those in fellowship
with one another.
Augustines rule of charity makes the phenomenon of blessed failing an
important dimension of Christian hermeneutics, hence his return to the
story of the wayfaring traveler in Book Two of De Doctrina in the context
of interpretive erring. According to Augustine,
27
Saint Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, 1.II.67; cited in Chretin, Under the
Gaze, 27.
28
Chatillon cited in Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2.142.
202 G. KUCHAR
Anyone with an interpretation of the scriptures that differs from that of the
writer is misled, but not because the scriptures are lying. If he is misled
by an idea of the kind that builds up love, which is the end of the com-
mandment, he is misled in the same way as a walker who leaves his path
by mistake but reaches the destination to which the road leads by going
through a field.29
29
Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R.P.H.Green (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 27.
30
Ibid.
31
For a related analysis of Augustine, see Gerald Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern,
159.
32
Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998), 169.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 203
I put off the CXIXth Psalm, as well on account of its well-known length, as
on account of its depth being fathomable by few. And when my brethren
deeply regretted that the exposition of this Psalm alone, so far as pertaineth
strongly pressed me to pay this debt, I yielded not to them, though they
long entreated and solicited me; because as often as I began to reflect upon
it, it always exceeded the utmost stretch of my powers. For in proportion
as it seemeth more open, so much the more deep doth it appear to me
[Quanto enim videtur apertior, tanto mihi profundor videri solet]; so that
I cannot show how deep it is. For in others, which are understood with
difficulty, although the sense lie hid in obscurity, yet the obscurity itself
appeareth; but in this, not even this is the case; since it is superficially such,
that it seemeth not to need an expositor, but only a reader and listener.
And now that at length I approach its interpretation, I am utterly ignorant
what I can achieve in it: nevertheless, I hope that God will aid me with His
Presence, that I may effect something. (560)
33
Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York:
W.W.Norton, 2007), 419. References to Augustines commentary on Psalm 119 are given
in text by page number and are from Expositions on the Book of Psalms Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers: First Series Volume 8. ed. A Cleveland Coxe (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007).
204 G. KUCHAR
Augustine casts himself here in the role Paul played before the Corinthians.
Standing before his brethren in weakness, fear, and trembling, Augustine
finds himself so fully absorbed by the holy book that he is unable to locate
a vantage point that is sufficiently capacious enough to provide a point
of view from which to understand the text. Brought to the limits of his
own capacity as a reader, Augustine is forced to reflect back on his own
situation as an interpreter of scripture. He thus admits the necessarily pro-
visional nature of his commentary: Now that I approach its interpre-
tation, I am utterly ignorant what I can achieve in it (560). Part of the
psalms power for Augustine lies in the way that it thematizes participatory
exegesis, raising general questions about the very nature of sacred reading.
In particular, Augustine notes the psalmists desire to incarnate the law so
fully as to become a living instance of it. What is at issue for him is not only
how to read Christian mystery but how to allow oneself to be read by it.
Augustine here hits on one of the most striking features of The Country
Parson, namely Herberts insistence, in Kristine A. Wolbergs words,
that holy living establishes the truth of doctrine.34 But rather than
being alien to orthodox Christianity, this concern with doing rather
than simply knowing truth is one of Augustines major preoccupations
and a central question in post-reformation Christendom. Throughout his
career, Augustine engaged in a sustained meditation on different modes
of understanding sacra doctrina. Indeed, what really strikes Augustine
about Psalm 119 is the way it expounds the different modes of under-
standing proper to spiritual life. In particular, Augustine is fascinated by
the way the psalm dilates on the differences between intellectually appre-
hending Gods law and actually fulfilling it through ones actions and
person. As he explains:
Many learn the righteousnesses of God, and learn them not, For they know
them in a certain way; and again do not know them from a kind of igno-
rance, since they do them not. In this sense the Psalmist therefore is to be
understood to have said, That I might learn Thy righteousnesses, meaning
that kind of knowledge whereby they are performed. (571)
34
Kristine A.Wolberg, All Possible Art: George Herberts The Country Parson. Madison:
Fairleigh Dickinson, 2008.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 205
My soul hath failed for Thy salvation: and I hoped because of Thy word
It is not every failing that should be supposed to be blameable or deserving
punishment: there is also a failing that is laudable or desirable This losing
ground is therefore good: for it doth indicate a longing after good, not as
yet indeed gained, but most eagerly and earnestly desired. (573)
35
Patrologiae cursus completus series latina, ed. J-P Migne etal. (Paris, 18441903), v.
37, p.1555. The King James translation reads: My soul fainteth for thy salvation: but I hope
in thy word
36
For Gadamers treatment of these themes, see Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern,
205 and Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamers Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1985), 8.
206 G. KUCHAR
Yet still they shout, and crie, and stop their eares,
Putting my life among their sinnes and fears,
And therefore wish my bloud on them and theirs:
Was ever grief like mine?
Like Christ in the Gospel of Luke, Herberts Jesus diagnoses his per-
secutors as being guilty of false consciousness. They do not understand
how their sadistic cry to be covered in Christs blood conceals a much
truer meaning: used and wished aright, their cry for blood betrays a need
to have their sins blotted out. More than simply scriptural, though, this
irony turns on the distinction between the objective work that the pas-
sion accomplishes and the subjective working of those responsible for
it. As the twelfth-century theologian Peter of Poitiers explains: So God
approved of the passion of Christ carried out by the Jews, insofar as it was
the Jews work done [opus iudaoeroum operatum], but did not approve
the Jews doing of the work [opera iudaeorum operantia].39 For Herbert,
this distinction applies to Christ as priest rather than the stewards of the
eucharist as it does in the Roman Catholic tradition.
38
For the poems medieval liturgical contexts, see Rosemund Tuve, A Reading of George
Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 1999. For a competing view of the
poem, see Ilona Bell, Setting Foot into Divinity: George Herbert and the English
Reformation, in Essential Articles for the study of George Herberts Poetry ed. John R.Roberts
(Hamden: Archon Books, 1979), 6386. For a subtle reconsideration of Herberts passion
poems, see also Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 149154.
39
Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae 1.16 as cited in Agamben, Opus Dei, 23.
208 G. KUCHAR
Just as Christians cast away the robe of sin by wearing Christs flesh,
so they make themselves gay for church in thanks for having been made
fit for Paradise. Herbert thus estranges a common scriptural idiom by
implicitly literalizing it vis--vis a secular idiom associated with physical
clothing. Recalling The Sacrifice, this stanza shows how an ordinary act
subtly bears the terrible, if redemptive, weight of providential irony.
Ilona Bell has done much to help us appreciate the estranging dimension
of Herberts Christological poetics in the opening poems of The Temple.
As Bell shows, Herberts decision to begin The Temple with a poem based
on the Good Friday reproaches of the medieval liturgy was designed to
unsettle and alienate readers, rather than conform to their expectations of
liturgical tradition.40 What Bell perhaps does not emphasize enough, how-
ever, is the extent to which Christs paschal reproaches have always been
inherently unsettling and that it is these aspects which Herberts poem
41
Rene Girard, Mimesis and Violence, in The Girard Reader ed. James G. Williams
(New York: Crossroad, 2001), 919, 9.
210 G. KUCHAR
Ibid., 10.
42
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 211
and you acquire the Word for which you pay over yourself, and you acquire
yourself in the Word to whom you pay yourself.44 Though often dismay-
ing, such self-dispossession is figured at the opening of The Church as a
spiritually liberating release into a wider, richer, horizon of experience than
had previously shown itself.
44
Works of Augustine, 13.210.
45
I echo thetitle ofJames Alisons The Joy ofBeing Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter
Eyes (New York: Crossroad, 1998).
46
James T. Bretzke, Consecrated Phrases: A Latin Theological Dictionary (Collegeville
Minnesota, 1998), 49.
214 G. KUCHAR
and administer him (257). Faced with this confusion, there is nothing
the minister can do but kneel before the authority of the revealed mystery
and hope that the activity itself will give rise to understanding:
Neither findes he any issue in this, but to throw himself down at the throne
of grace, saying, Lord, thou knowest what thou didst, when thou appoint-
edst it to be done thus; therefore doe thou fulfill what thou dost appoint;
for thou art not only the feast, but the way to it. (2578)
Much like the speaker of the previous poem Sepulchre, this speaker
feels himself to be in the position of Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb.
Having already arisen, Christ appears to have taken his sweets with him,
leaving no need for further offerings. In the wake of feeling himself to
be behind an absent Christ, the speaker of Easter cannot figure what it
means to rise with him as required by the liturgical cycle: Rise heart; thy
Lord is risen. Sing his praise. Just as Christ refuses Magdalenes desire to
touch him in the Gospel of John, so the speaker feels unsure of how to
consume Gods flesh by participating in communion.
This anxiety about participating in communion diminishes in the fol-
lowing stanza in a way that closely recalls the lessons learned in the passion
sequence:
realize that Christ is not one person within the Christian fellowship but
the very condition of fellowship as such. As Sibbes says, We are now
come to the banquet, and Christ is the founder of it; nay, he is the feast
itself. He is the author of it, and he it is that we feed upon (2.451).
Easter thus further clarifies the distinction between contesting and
communing with Christ initiated in the early passion sequence. In doing
so, it provides the speaker with a widened appreciation of the mode of
Christs grounding presence in the eucharist. Through this process,
Herberts speaker reencounters, and to some extent reworks, the paradox
of Christian liturgy that Augustine expresses while defining the nature of
sacramental signification. Writing to Bishop Boniface sometime between
408 and 413, Augustine asks: Has not Christ been sacrificed once in
himself, and yet in the mystery [sacramento] he is sacrificed for the people,
not only during all the solemnities of Easter, but every day?47 This idea
that the single event of the passion repeats itself on all subsequent days
suggests that Augustine sees the atonement as a new creation in a way
that complements his account of the beginning of things in On the Literal
Meaning of Genesis. For Augustine, the seven days of creation involve six
repetitions of the one primordial act of creation, none of which refer to
days in the normal, quotidian, sense of the term. As he explains: In all
the days of creation there is one day, and it is not to be taken in the
sense of our day, which we reckon by the course of the sun; but it must
have another meaning, applicable to the three days mentioned before the
creation of the heavenly bodies.48 In other words, the primordial act of
creation establishes the conditions for quotidian time rather than being an
instance of it. This is precisely the realization that the speaker of Easter
makes in the blessed error of the poems concluding stanza as the resur-
rection now appears as a new creation:
Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J. (New
48
The speaker here discovers what Paul means in the second letter to the
Corinthians: Behold, now is the accepted time, behold, now is the day
of salvation (6:2). But in doing so, he offers a striking example of how
the experience of holy mystery is often concomitant in The Temple with
the experience of being in error. An essential feature of his spiritual vision,
this aspect of Herberts poetics is much more than a bare application of
the felix culpa motif. It is a hermeneutical insight that guards against the
reductive drive for religious certainty of whatever variety. By the end of
Easter, we are left with the sense that what Andrewes says of Magdalene
at the empty tomb goes also for Herberts speaker, namely that there was
error in her love, but there was love in her error too (3.12). For him the
resurrection happens every day not because the eucharist is a literal corpo-
ral sacrifice via transubstantiation (a view that can only be anachronistically
attributed to Augustine), but because it is the ground or basis on which all
future days come to spiritually rest.
Given this general parallel with Andrewes, it is perhaps not surpris-
ing that the ending of Easter crescendos in a similar manner as many
of Andrewes high-holiday sermons. For example, his 1604 Good Friday
sermon concludes by praising how Easter Friday focuses the kind of spiri-
tual attention believers should strive for on all days. Deploying similarly
Augustinian idioms as Herbert, Andrewes teaches that
this, as at all other times, for no day is amiss but at all times some time to
be taken for this duty, so specially on this day; this day, which we hold holy
to the memory of His Passion, this day to do it; to make this day, the day of
Gods wrath and Christs suffering, a day to us of serious consideration and
regard of them both. (2.1567)
That this now shall be still now, and never have an end; and this cruciaris
be cruciaris for ever, and never declined into a preter tense, as recepisti was.
This is an exaltation of the cross, above all else; none shall ever come down
from it, none shall ever beg our body to lay it in our sepulchre. (2.85)
49
Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2.138.
50
Bell, Setting Foot, 80.
218 G. KUCHAR
In the first Jordan poem, the speaker asks if all beauty must be in a wind-
ing stair, recalling Bacons warning in Of Great Place that All Rising
to Great Place, is by a Winding Staire.51 Jordan (II) returns to Bacon
but now it is his idols of the mind that Herbert echoes, not the essays. In
particular, Herbert recalls how Bacon thought that human understand-
ing is like an uneven mirror receiving rays from things and merging its own
nature with the nature of things, which thus distorts and corrupts it,52
hence Bacons use of the term idola to describe ungrounded speculations
about nature. By idola Bacon does not mean idols but something much
closer to the Greek term eidwla, which denotes the false impositions that
51
Cited in D.M.Hill, Allusion and Meaning in Herberts Jordan I Neophilologus 56.3
(1972), 344352,350.
52
Bacon, The New Organon, 41.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 219
the human mind projects onto the things of nature.53 One of the main
characteristics of the idols, according to Bacon, is that they are unproduc-
tive. They do not provide any light for further knowledge, leading only
to airy speculations and fruitless verbiage. And because the idols consti-
tute human projections onto natural phenomena, they turn nature into
a mirror in which we gaze at ourselves rather than showing the truth of
things. The result is a kind of demonic variation on the idea of scripture
as a mirror that reveals the inner truth of things. This notion of idolatrous
thought as unproductive is central to Jordan (II), only now the issue is
poetic fruitfulness rather than scientific productivity.
Jordan (II) unfolds by developing two key images, both of which
convey pointless activity: poet as bawd and poet as vainly phallic. The
first image develops the motif of poetry as meretricious in Jordan (I),
which is then picked up again in the thematically related lyric The
Forerunners. Now in Jordan (II), the poet is said to give birth to dead
or dying figures which have the effect of prostituting the divine mean-
ing that is intended, hence their lewd offer of service in stanza two:
Thousands of notions did runne Offring their service, If I were
not sped. This image suggests that the poets activity is as prurient as that
of the fleet Astronomer in Vanitie, who surveys the stars as though
he were a potential customer outside a brothel (Wilcox, 308). Despite
the speakers plain intention in Jordan (II), he finds himself clothing
God in his own image rather than discovering Gods image in himself (line
11). The proper roles thus get reversed here as it is Christ who spiritually
clothes the old man with new flesh as we saw in Sunday (Rom. 13:14, 1
Cor. 15:53, Gal. 3:27). Getting his role backward, the speaker admits that
he has been guilty of idolatry, worshiping idols of his own making rather
than disclosing God through prayerful verse. The result is a series of still
and demonic births that are blotted out, as though in demonic parody of
Christs regenerative blotting out of sin in Colossians 2:14.
In the case of the second, phallic image the poets thoughts swell
sprout and burnish without ever taking seed, a point that is exposed
in the friends cutting suggestion to save expense. Bearing the same
connotation as Shakespeares an expense of spirit in a waste of shame,
the friends phrase rebukes the poets unfertile male ego: There is in love a
53
Iain M. Mackenzie, Gods Order and Natural Law: The Work of Laudian Divines
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 47.
220 G. KUCHAR
sweetnesse readie pennd: / Copie out onely that, and save expense (1718).
Both images of sterility disclose the extent to which true spiritual and
poetic productivity rests in the fecundity of the divine Word. The poets
major error, then, is to have circumvented the Word by projecting himself
into the sense, a point he explicitly confesses in the opening of stanza
three: As flames do work and winde, when they ascend, / So did I weave
my self into the sense (1314).
Initially, this idolatrous process looks like it is going to result in a birth as
his thoughts burnish in the sense of grow plump (OED, 3). Yet, this
meaning turns out to be more apparent than real, as the verb really means
to gloss or to polish (OED, 2). The same double meaning applies to
the verb sprout, which first appears to mean to grow or to issue
(OED, 3) but eventually signifies to gush or to squirt (OED, 4).
So although the poets thoughts multiply, they have no real substance
or life-giving power. These are the kinds of thoughts that Bacon refers
as the idols of the marketplace, those thoughts that are based on empty
verbiage rather than sound and productive knowledge. Bacon warns that
such words beget words doing violence to the understanding which
is, itself, ceaselessly active, and cannot stop or rest seek[ing] to go
further; but in vain.54 These prodigiously mental births are all very dan-
gerous, Bacon asserts, because the human understanding is most affected
by things which have the ability to strike and enter the mind all at once
and suddenly, and to fill and expand the imagination.55 Echoing Bacon,
Herbert conceives of the imagination as a womb that is susceptible to infil-
tration by unproductive notions that arise from within the mind itself. The
result is a picture of the mind swelling rather than expanding.
Like Bacons scientifically unproductive ideas, the speakers inventions
are ceaselessly in motion but without any purpose or aim, hence the poets
admission that he bustles, meaning, To move or work vigorously but
aimlessly (OED, 1); To be fussily or noisily active; to move about in an
energetic and busy manner; to make a show of activity (OED, 2a). For
Bacon, true philosophical induction begins when the purging of the idols
ends. Similarly for Herberts speaker, true poetic writing begins when
the poet ceases to weave himself into the sense in a spiritually aimless or
purposeless manner. The parallel lies in the principle that the process of
discovery is impeded by the misapprehensions of the prejudiced human
Ibid., 43.
55
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 221
mind. Once those prejudices are removed, the mind gains greater, less
mediated, access to the object it seeks to know.
Yet, this parallel between poetic composition and Baconian induc-
tion collapses in the poems devastatingly ironic and richly beguiling
conclusion.
Given the speakers depiction of his mind as a vulnerable womb which
impregnates itself with dead thoughts, the friends suggestion to save
expense is as doubly gendered as the three key verbs in line four are.
The spiritual motion brings the poet out of his fantasy of autonomous
productivity long enough to see that true poetic activity does not consist
in creating what Shakespeare calls, in a very similar context, new found
methods, but in the living Word which is evry day a new Creatour.
The implication is that the unproductive poet-bawd should open himself
to the Word so as to become impregnated by it. In this respect, Jordan
(II) assumes the patristic notion of the Word as Logos Spermatikos, the
inseminating power of spiritual creation which Andrewes assumes when
he says that good works beget and bring forth the mystery of the Word
through a kind of birth or generation (1.42). According to Jordan
(II), true poetry involves precisely this rebirthing of the Word through
the poets participation in it. Crucially, then, participation means imitation
as reproduction or birthing not imitation as copying or engraving. We are
thus reminded here of Andrewes commentary (discussed in Chap.3) on
the epistle of James insistence that Christians must be doers of the word
as the Greek phrase poitai logou bears the sense of poets of the Logos.56
Importantly, the term poitai is opposed to the simple akroats, the poet
in the Greek sense of him who makes or does.57 For Herbert, the reli-
gious poet must be more like a midwife or mother than a self-contained
masculine ego. After all, the Christian poet must further the living Word
rather than give rise to a dead letter.
Read in terms of its guiding imagery, Jordan (II)s revised title
becomes easier to understand. Jordan is the site of spiritual rebirth, the
place where regeneration begins. Viewed this way, Jordan (II) defines
poetry as the renewing of the divine Word as the source of spiritual life
within the poets soul. In this respect, Herberts poem implicitly identifies
a fundamental difference between Baconian and Augustinian discovery.
Where the natural philosopher empties himself of prejudice, purifying his
Ibid.
57
222 G. KUCHAR
mind of the idols so as to see nature clearly, the poet empties himself of
vainly human creations so as to be filled with the Word, thereby allowing
him to participate in spiritual reality. And while Herberts speaker follows
Bacon in rejecting human language as a site of discovery, he turns to the
divine Word in its place. What the poem thus stages is the speakers birth
as a religious poet. By the end of the lyric, the speaker recognizes himself
as the midwife of the Word. Viewed this way, it becomes clear that Jordan
(II) brings the themes of poetic discovery and beauty explored in the
New Year Sonnets to their fullest, most mature expression.
Responding to the various misunderstandings that have occurred in
the poem thus far, the final stanza of Jordan (II) challenges us to
rethink what it might mean to copy the Word. Given the mysterious-
ness of love and the lexical richness of sweetnessnot to mention the
lessons learned in The Thanksgivingcopy cannot mean transcribe.58
It can only take its figurative sense of To make or form an imitation of
(anything); to imitate, reproduce, follow (OED, 3a.). In keeping with
the poems imagery, reproduce is the best choice here. Ultimately,
the friend reminds the poet that Christ is to be reproduced not con-
tested, followed not literally transcribed. Here we see Herbert stress-
ing both the vitality and the vulnerability of the living Word. To make
the divine Word live, the poet must do more than engrave it; he must
make it his own by reproducing it anew. While the overall vision here
is deeply rooted in Augustinian hermeneutics, it is expressed through a
careful reworking of Baconian idioms. Herbert deploys Baconian idi-
oms in order to contrast two completely distinct modes of knowing
and erring. In one form of knowing, the subject stands above and out-
side the known, gaining access to it through trial and error. But in the
other form, the knower participates in and with the known, clarifying
the nature of such participation through patterns of correction and revi-
sion. The end result is a poetics that is adequate to a spiritual vision in
which truth and beauty are processes one experiences as an immanent
participant within Christian narrative as it unfolds in specific contexts.
Herberts conception of poetry as divine impregnation is consistent with
his broader exegetical vision of scripture as the living Word.
58
For a discussion of the aesthetic connotations of sweetness in medieval and early modern
thought, see Mary Carruthers, Sweetness, Speculum 81.4 (October 2006), 9991013.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 223
The Quidditie
Jordan (II) is not the only poem in The Temple that deploys Baconian
idioms as a way of addressing the question of poetry in Augustinian
terms. A similar dynamic also unfolds in the ironically named lyric The
Quidditie.
Although its neo-Aristotelian title leads us to expect a definition of
poetrys essence along scholastic lines, The Quidditie ultimately defines
verse in terms of its spiritual utility or devotional use rather than its what-
ness. It begins and ends this way:
59
Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, And The Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1998), 170.
60
Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 189.
224 G. KUCHAR
61
See Steven Matthews, Francis Bacon and the Divine Hierarchy of Nature, in The
Invention of Discovery, ed. James D. Fleming The Invention of Discovery, 15001700
(Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 2944 and Michael McCanles, The New Science and the Via
Negativa: A Mystical Source for Baconian Empiricism in Julie Robin Solomon and Catherine
Gimelli Martin (eds.), Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early-Modern Thought (Burlington:
Ashgate 2005), 4568.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 225
The game that we will play at shall be called the triumph, which if it be well
played at, he that dealeth shall win; the players shall likewise win; and the
standers and lookers upon shall do the same; insomuch that there is no man
that is willing to play at this triumph with these cards, but they shall be all
winners, and no losers.62
62
Hugh Latimer, Works, 1.8.
63
G.R.Evans, Getting it wrong, 20.
226 G. KUCHAR
To try to generate error for the sake of comprehending the cosmos would
be equivalent to playing God. On this point, Bacon disagreed.
Central to Bacons project is an attempt to overturn Aristotles view
that individual errors in nature do not have a metaphysical cause and are
thus philosophically inconsequential. In rejecting this Aristotelian view,
Bacon simultaneously overturned Augustines position that errors cannot
be methodologically engendered. For Bacon, errors are more than a by-
product of experimental procedures; they are an essential, structural fea-
ture of the inductive method. Bacon believed that knowledge of nature
can appear only when nature is vexed or errs from its usual course64a
point Herbert echoes in The Pearl when he says he knows what willing
nature speaks, what forcd by fire (6). One form of such erring involves
what Bacon calls Deviant Instances (Instantiae Deviantes). Sensitively
distinguishing between kinds of errors and the forms of knowledge made
available by each, Bacon describes deviant instances as
errors of nature, freaks and monsters, where nature deflects and declines
from its usual course. Errors of nature differ from unique instances in the fact
that unique instances are wonders of species, whereas errors of nature are
wonders of individuals. But their use [in natural philosophy] is pretty much
the same, because they fortify the intellect in the face of the commonplace,
and reveal common forms for errors in one direction show and point the
way to errors in and deviations in all directions.65
Whereas with Aristotle, any deviation from the regular course of nature had
to be without a metaphysical cause and so could never become the object of
purposeful human deliberation (all regularity being underwritten by meta-
physically principled per se causes), Bacons disaggregation of Aristotelian
species forms into simple ones allows for the accidental deviation to be
reproduced deliberately.66
64
Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern
England (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), 114.
65
Bacon, New Organon, 148.
66
Witmore, Culture of Accidents, 120.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 227
the same biblical incident to help define mans true calling that Bacon uses
to define the philosophers scientific calling: the angels before the empty
tomb of Christ asking the searchers within, Why seek ye the living among
the dead? (Luke 24:5). In Vanitie 1 from The Temple Herbert remarks,
Poore man, thou searchest round / To find out death, but missest life
at hand To try to find scientific truth by reading scripture, Bacon had
said in the Instauratio, is inter viva quaerentes mortuus (seeking the dead
among the living): to try to find theological truths in natural philosophy,
he had said in the Latin version of the Advancement that Herbert helped to
translate, represents the opposite mistake.67
Whitney then goes on to criticize Herbert for not acknowledging the par-
allels between his project and that of Bacons. In Whitneys view, Herbert
participates in the modern search for epistemological grounds. Placing
Herbert in the same tradition as Bacon and Descartes, Whitney reads
Herbert as pursuing certainty. My burden throughout this book is to sug-
gest that this is exactly what Herbert does not do.
On the contrary, Herbert continually distinguishes different modes
of discovery and the varying forms of understanding proper to them.
And in doing so, he deploys Baconian idioms and ideas for poetic and
spiritual ends which are essentially Augustinian. Unlike Bacon, Herbert
does not seek the stability of first principles or philosophical methods.
Instead, he seeks to keep open the experience of mystery, carefully dis-
tinguishing knowledge-as-certainty from understanding-as-initiation-
into-the-mystery. In this way, Herberts poetry cannot be said to share
in the Ramist desire to unify all learning that so excited early modern
intellectuals. At no point does Herbert seek to synthesize modes of dis-
covery and invention by transcending distinctions among logic, poetry,
and dialectic so characteristic of seventeenth-century thought. If not
anti-Baconian in any strict sense, Herbert nevertheless sought to sustain
distinctions between information-transfer and spiritual awareness, the
67
Charles Whitney, Bacon and Herbert: Bacon and Herbert as Moderns in Like Seasond
Timber: New Essays on George Herbert eds. Edmund Miller and Robert DiYanni (New York:
Peter Lang, 1987), 231240, 232.
TRUTH ANDMETHOD: ERROR ANDDISCOVERY INTHE TEMPLE 229
68
For an account of the coexisting modernities of the post-Enlightenment world, see
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007).
69
Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, 154.
230 G. KUCHAR
If The Temple was partly designed to cultivate an audience with the ears
to hear, there remains the question of what this may have meant exactly
within an early modern context. What does it mean to listen to mystery of
the Word in Herberts culture? And how do ideas about early modern lis-
tening animate Herberts practice of mystagogy? In asking such questions
we inevitably broaden our understanding of the protestant Reformation as
a revolution in reading. While we know that the Reformation witnessed an
increase in biblical literacy as scripture was read in various European ver-
naculars by an increasing number of believers, it is important to remember
that most people in early modern England heard the bible more often than
they read it. In fact, hearing the bible in church was so important that the
producers of the Authorized Version made sure to read their translations
aloud to one another to ensure its effectiveness as an oral text.1 For them,
the idea that faith comes by hearing was not a theological abstraction but
a perfectly quotidian reality orienting the work of scriptural translation.
Arnold Hunt has even gone so far as to suggest that the general priv-
ileging of speech over writing in post-reformation England led to an
emphasis on preaching over and above the written word of scripture; a
distrust of printed books; and a belief that bare reading, even the reading
1
Gordon Campbell, Bible: The Story of The King James Version 16112011 (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2010), 80.
of the Bible, could not suffice for salvation.2 However strongly phrased
this thesis may be, the early modern English bible very much remained an
oral text, one that was routinely heard in sermons, in the liturgy, in acts of
common prayer, and in domestic settings.
Although Herbert scholars have attended closely to the musical dimen-
sions of The Temple, no one, to my knowledge, has stepped back to ask the
more general question of how sound and hearing function in it.3 What hap-
pens when we read The Temple by listening to its representation of sound
and hearing not only as transhistorical phenomena shared through a com-
mon biology but also as they were understood in the early modern period?
How does The Temple resonate differently when we attend to early modern
ideas about the physics, physiology, and theology of sound, ideas that bring
with them protocols of listening, remarkably different from ours?4
By tuning into early modern frequencies, we will discover that hearing
and sound sometimes mean different things in the seventeenth century
than they do for us and that such differences have crucial consequences
for Herberts poetics of mystery. At the same time, however, there are
certain phenomenological givens that continue to animate the power of
fascination that Herberts poems possess. In this chapter, I shall exam-
ine Herberts understanding of what it means to hearken by attending to
the historical differences between him and us, while, at the same time,
not denying the basic givens of human biology that continue to make his
poetry vital. By doing so, we shall see that the dialogical dimensions of his
prayerful art consist of much more than the spiritual motions explored in
previous chapters. They also consist of a specific understanding of what it
means to hear the Word as an embodied being. For Herbert, early modern
ideas about sound and hearing mediate practices of prayer and reading in
ways that are so fundamental they usually go without saying. And yet, to
ignore them is to overlook some of the most constitutive features of The
Temples spiritual aesthetic, especially its depiction of poetry as a species
of prayer in which one rediscovers that Faith cometh by hearing, and
2
Hunt, Art of Hearing, 21.
3
For major statements on Herbertand music, see John Hollander, The Untuning of the
Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 15001700 (Princeton: University of Princeton Press,
1961), 245331 and Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century
England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 134174.
4
Bruce R.Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Attending to the O-Factor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 8. This chapter builds on Smiths practice of
historical phenomenology.
THE MYSTERY OFHEARKENING: LISTENING FORTHEODOUR 235
earing by the Word of God (Rom. 10:17). Such an approach will help
h
us see that Herbert shared his cultures general feeling that the act of
hearkening involves a renewed appreciation of ones immanence within
the revealed Word, an immanence that is somatic as it is soulful, and as
quotidian as it is mysterious.
Christ is the word; hearing then, that sense, is Christs sense In matters of
faith the ear goes first ever, and is of more use, and to be trusted before the
eye. For in many cases faith holdeth, where sight faileth. (3.21)
Such sentiments recall Luthers slightly less refined declaration that the
church is not a pen-house but a mouth-house, the Gospel should not
be written but screamed (LW, 56.6364). It is with these assumptions
in mind that Herbert begins The Temple by calling readers to attention as
though they were about to hear a sermon:
5
Thomas Washbourne, Divine Poems (London: 1654).
6
Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 173.
236 G. KUCHAR
often as it was privately read, then the phrase Hearken unto a Verser
would have resonated for original audiences much more literally than for
subsequent generations of Herbert lovers.
Perhaps this is why only moments after figuring his poetry as a sup-
plement to sermons, Herbert again emphasizes the centrality of listen-
ing. Only now he reminds his readers that virtue has a tendency to enter
through the ear, while sin often comes through the eye:
Just as one often goes to hear rather than see a play in early modern
England, so one enters The Temple by hearkening unto a verser so as to
discover oneself through the power of the poets voice insofar as it is an
expression of the living Word.
Although Herbert is celebrated for his use of visual typography, he
was very much of his culture in maintaining the spiritual priority of hear-
ing over sight. This general emphasis on hearing as the source of faith
makes great sense in a culture as highly oral in character as early modern
England.7 As Martin Elsky has noted, Herberts poems were composed
during a time of transition when oral and written approaches to textuality
continued to intersect in the written and typographic word.8 The orality
to which Elsky refers is evinced in the Perirrhanterium by the typicality
of the imagined listener: a sweet youth whose early hopes make him both
valuable and vulnerable. Such typicality of character is a distinguishing
feature of writing that remains close to oral culture.9 Like proverbs, it
stamps the work with a public dimension, making the text function as
7
For Walter Ongs thesis that the early modern period undergoes a clear transition from
orality to literacy, see Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London:
Routledge, 2002). For balanced reassessments of this claim, see Adam Fox, Oral and
Literature Culture in England 15001700 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) and Arnold Hunt,
Art of Hearing, 59.
8
Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989), 149.
9
See Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prologomena for Cultural and Religious History
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1967).
THE MYSTERY OFHEARKENING: LISTENING FORTHEODOUR 237
10
For discussion of Herberts use of common place books, see Anne Ferry Titles in
George Herberts little book ELR 23 (1993), 314344 and Matthias Bauer, Herberts
Titles, Common Place Books, and the Poetics of Use: A Response to Anne Ferry.
Connotations 4.3 (19941995), 266279.
11
Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and
Douglas Denon Heath. Vol 2. (London: Longman, 1859), 241.
12
For a related discussion of Bacon, see Bruce Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and
Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 168207.
For a modern confirmation of Bacons basic views on sound, see Don Ihde, Listening and
Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio UP, 1976).
238 G. KUCHAR
On this account, sight and sound differ insofar as the visual sense remains
exterior to objects, while the aural sense penetrates into and becomes part
of them. This means that while the visible doth not mingle in the medium
the audible doth. As a result, voices or consorts of music do make
an harmony by mixture, which colours do not.13 Like scent, but unlike
sight, Bacon contends, sound interfuses with its environment, becoming
part of the medium in which it moves. As he explains,
The sweetest and best harmony is, when every part or instrument is not
heard by itself, but a conflation of them all; which requireth to stand some
distance off. Even as it is in the mixture of perfumes; or the taking of the
smells of several flowers in the air.14
If sight aspires toward clarity and distinctness, Bacon claims, sound and
scent find their perfection in concinnity. Sound and scent thus offer modes
of discovery that enhance the participation of knower with known rather
than distinguishing them, as Bacon would seek to do within the realm
of natural philosophy. Given Herberts investment in pre-Enlightenment
forms of discovery in which knowing involves a deepened initiation into
and participation with the known, these qualities of sound and smell take
on significant spiritual and poetic significance. As he declares in the second
of his New Year Sonnets, Lord, in thee / The beauty lies, in the discov-
ery (1314).
Herberts Baconian awareness that sound pulls one into the world of
others helps provide the speaker of Prayer (II) with a degree of assur-
ance that God is always accessible to the human voice. Rediscovering
Christs promise, Ask, and it will be given you (Matt. 7:7; Luke 11:9),
the speaker of Prayer (II) expresses surprise at Gods readiness to hear
the call of supplication:
Although Herbert quickly corrects the point about God not being able
to die, the point about hearing remains. This is because for Herbert, Gods
Ibid.
14
THE MYSTERY OFHEARKENING: LISTENING FORTHEODOUR 239
15
Richard Braithwaite, Essaies Upon The Five Senses 2nd ed. (London: 1635), 209.
Subsequent references are given in text by page number.
16
John Hollander, Untuning the Sky, 152 and OED 4a.
242 G. KUCHAR
my eare must bee tuned to another note, that my edifying Sence may dis-
charge her peculiar office; not to affect novelities, or chuse varieties, but to
dedicate her inward operation tothe mindes comfort (to wit) the Melodie
of Heaven. (33)
17
George Hakewill, The Vanitie of the Eie (Oxford: 1608), E4r as cited in Hunt, Art of
Hearing, 23.
THE MYSTERY OFHEARKENING: LISTENING FORTHEODOUR 243
Theses, Or Generall rules drawne by Art, from the line of Nature tried by
the touch-stone of infallible experience, and applied as observances to these
present times; having reference to the five Senses, (proper subjects) to which
they are restrained. (1)
18
Lactantius. The Divine Institutes Books I-VII. Trans. Sister Mary Francis McDonald, O.P.
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 1964), 97.
19
See G.R.Evans, Getting it Wrong, 114.
244 G. KUCHAR
We later learn that the ear can help save us from the envy and narcissism
generated by the eyes capacity to trap the soul in the shadows of the
imaginary. Hearing, in Braithwaites ratio of senses, orients and orders
other modes of perception. For him, the ear serves as what John Donne
calls the bones of the soul, organizing, commanding, and reorienting
the other senses (Sermons, 6.4.101). A discreet eare, Braithwaite writes,
seasons the understanding, marshals the rest of the senses wandring,
renewes the minde, preparing her to all difficulties (11, 1635). Whereas
Braitwaite perceives the well-tuned ear as seasoning the other senses,
Herbert presents the words My Master as perfuming and sweetening
the psyche. Through this perfuming, Herbert hopes to finde / What
cordials make this curious broth, / This broth of smells, that feeds and fats
my minde (810). In both Herbert and Braithwaite, the ethical person
does not transcend or annihilate his senses, but rather concentrates and
tunes them. Following the basic Pauline credo fides ex auditu, this process
of concentration begins with hearing. As Herbert tells us in The Church-
porch and as he shows us in The Odour 2 Cor. 2, poetry can play a
role in tuning the senses in precisely this way. In this very concrete sense,
Herbert conceives of poetry as a spiritual and sensual discipline.
Indeed, Braithwaites championing of sound as a means of discovering
the heart further explains Herberts description of poetry and prayer as
forms of spiritual sounding. Both Herbert and Braithwaite presuppose the
feature of sound that Walter Ong explains when he notes:
Herberts culture had a specific word for the kind of listening that
exposes interiors without any kind of violence, one that greatly preoc-
cupied John Donne.
The soul hath bones as well as the body. And in this Anatomy, and dissection
of the soul, as the bones of the soul, are the constant and strong resolutions
thereof, and as the seeing of the soul is understanding so the Hearing of
21
Cited in Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1415.
22
Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and The Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture.
Trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham UP, 1961), 3144.
246 G. KUCHAR
the soul is hearkening; in these religious exercises, we doe not hear, except
we hearken; for hearkening is the hearing of the soul. (6.4.1010)
True hearing is to the soul what bones are to the body: it orients the souls
movement, its direction, and thus its strength. Religion is in its essence
listening precisely insofar as hearing the Word yokes or ligatures the soul
to God.
Having decided between hearing and hearkening, Donne then tests his
audience to discover who is listening to him right now at the very moment
he is speaking about the art of listening. Adopting a theatrically engaging
form of reflexivity, Donne warns his audience not to undergo a perverse
ecstasy in which body and soul separate due to ennui rather than rapture:
It were a strange and a perverse extasie, that the body being here, at a reli-
gious exercise, and in a religious posture, the soul should be gone out to the
contemplation, and pursuit of the pleasures or profits of this world. You come
hither but to your own funeralls, if you bring nothing hither but your bodies;
you come but to be enterred, to be laid in the earth, if the ends of your comming
be earthly respects, prayse, and opinion, and observation of men; you come to be
Canonized, to grow Saints, if your souls be here Thou art good, O Lord, to
that soul that seeks thee; It is St. Augustines note, that it is put in the singular,
Animae, to that soul. (6.4.1012)
As with the meaning of prayer, the full significance of a sermon only comes
retrospectively. It is only after the preacher speaks that we will know if you
have been hearkening:
We cannot see now, whether thy soul be here now, or no; but, tomorrow,
hereafter, in the course of thy life, they which are near thee [and] know
whether thy soul use to be at Sermons, as well as thy body uses to go to
Sermons. Faith comes by hearing, saith the Apostle; but it is by that hearing
of the soul, Hearkening, Considering. (6.4.102)
As the soul is infused by God, but diffused over the whole body, and so
there is a Man, so Faith is infused from God, but diffused into our works,
and so there is a Saint. Practise is the Incarnation of Faith, Faith is incor-
porated and manifested in a body, by works; and the way to both, is that
Hearing, which amounts to this Hearkening, to a diligent, to a considerate,
to a profitable Hearing. (6.4.102)
Hearing is the way to the fulfillment of the faithful soul because its diffu-
sion in time and space orients us in relation to the world, to one another,
and most of all to God. This is a theology of, in, and by the body as a
receptor of sound.
Herbert closely echoes Donnes emphases in The Prayer before
Sermon in The Country Parson when he teaches parsons to pray in the
following manner:
O make thy word a swift word, passing from the ear to the heart, from the
heart to the life and conversation: that as the rain returns not empty, so nei-
ther may thy word, but accomplish that for which it is given. O Lord hear,
O Lord forgive! O Lord, hearken. (289)
Lancelot Andrewes locates the key distinction at stake in each of these dis-
cussions in the epistle of St. James. Warning against the dangers of sermon
mongering, he stresses the importance of doing the word as well as simply
hearing it. This means that Christians must not be bare hearers,
but . . . attentive hearers; that in so doing you do well (5.191).
insight that when Protestant writers declared that hearing was preferable
to sight, they meant it quite literally.24
In our scientific world, the objective phenomenon of sound and the
subjective act of hearing are two substantially different things. We now
recognize the mental event of hearing to be a translation of sound waves
such that the physics and physiology of sound have become two differ-
ent phenomena. This was not the case in Herberts culture. In Herberts
world, the ear was generally thought to literally receive sound in the form
of rarified air particles. Following Aristotle, Herberts culture associated
the senses with the four elements in a system of correspondences, connect-
ing the eye with water, smell with fire, touch with earth, and the ear with
air. Believing sound to be rarified air particles moving between mind and
world, Herberts readers came to The Temple as they went to a sermon,
with a kind of preconscious belief in an isomorphism of sound. In hearing
the world, Herberts readers believed that they were, in effect, touching it.
This belief that hearing is a form of spiritualized touching gives a word
like hearken an immediacy, an intimacy, in short, a force, that it does not
have for those of us who hear in the word sound a disjunction between
physics and physiology, to say nothing of physics and theology. Indeed,
the entire language of sense experience means something different in the
early modern period than it does for us. By bearing this difference in mind,
it is perhaps not too much to say that early modern culture was more
amenable to the Pauline belief that hearing the Word makes one intimate
with God than we are today. After all, in hearing the Word early modern
auditors thought that they were directly encountering it physically, much
as the Virgin Mary does in visual depictions of the annunciation in which
she receives the Word into her ear via a banderole. All of which helps
explain the early modern belief that to hearken to the divine Word is to
undergo a virtual annunciation. As Richard Sibbes teaches,
UP, n.d), 139160 and Louis Vinge, The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition (Lund:
Royal Society of Letters, 1975), 1546, 71103.
24
Hunt, Art of Hearing, 24.
THE MYSTERY OFHEARKENING: LISTENING FORTHEODOUR 249
25
See Theresa M.DiPasquale, Literature & Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John
Donne (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1999), 76 and my Poetry of Religious Sorrow, Chapter 4.
250 G. KUCHAR
when he cries, in Christs Nativity, let once more by mystic birth / The
Lord of life be born on earth (2930), and which is further developed in
The Banquet when Herbert praises God, who gives perfumes, / Flesh
assumes, / And with it perfumes my heart (2224).
Taken together, the distinctly pre-Cartesian combination of phys-
ics and theology animating The Odour 2 Cor. 2 helps explain why
prayer was so often thought to have the physically enjoyable effects
dramatized in Herberts poem. Such enjoyable effects are also a func-
tion of how Herberts theory of mind remains grounded in Augustines
sacralization of Aristotles sensus communis. In the early modern world,
after sound enters the ear it goes to the sensus communis where it com-
bines with other senses in order to become a fully realized thought. The
sensually unifying function performed by the sensus communis tends
to delimit hard and fast distinctions among the senses. This is why
Aristotelian-inflected accounts of sense experience are often synesthetic
in nature. In the case of The Odour, Herberts depiction of how the
Word transforms one in both body and soul recalls Augustines claim in
Homilies on the Gospel of John that in the Word seeing and hearing are
not diverse things but hearing is sight, and sight is hearing.26 In the
course of his commentary, Augustine sacralizes his cultures pagan con-
ception of the psyche by imagining what it looks like after having been
regenerated as an image of the Word. According to Augustine, when
sense experience becomes unified in the regenerated heart, the soul
perceives the world in a way that conforms more closely to that of the
synesthetic totality that is the Word. In thy flesh, Augustine writes,
thou hearest in one place, seest in another; in thy heart, where thou
seest, there thou hearest.27 For Augustine, spiritual insight is charac-
terized by its unification of sensory phenomena. He expresses this point
in a sermon that describes how a soul in a state of blessedness delights
in justice through a spiritualization of the senses:
if you have got interior senses, all these interior senses, are delighted by the
delights of justice. If you have got interior eyes, observe the light of justice
If you have interior ears, try to hear justice. Such were the ears he was
looking for, the one who said: Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear (Lk.
26
St. Augustine, Gospel of John, First Epistle of John, and Soliloquies. Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers. Ed. Philip Schaff (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 121.
27
Ibid.
THE MYSTERY OFHEARKENING: LISTENING FORTHEODOUR 251
8:8). If you have an interior sense of smell, listen to the apostle: For we are
the good odor of Christ for God everywhere (2 Cor 2:15). If you have an
interior sense of taste, listen to this: Taste and see that the Lord is sweet (Ps.
34:9).28
28
Sermons 159.4.4 as cited in T.J. Van Bavel, The Longing of the Heart: Augustines
Doctrine on Prayer (Leuven-Walpole: Peeters, 2009), 59.
29
See On the Trinity Books 815. Ed. Gareth B. Matthews. Trans. Stephen McKenna
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 15.12.193.
30
Erasmus, Collected Works: Spiritualia v. 66, p.61.
31
See footnote 45 Chap. 2.
252 G. KUCHAR
very least, it is difficult to imagine the word magic that transpires in The
Odour between My Master and My Servant having been written
without something like this elevated conception of biblical revelation lurk-
ing in the background of his poetics.
By depicting the experience of regeneration as a unifying of sense expe-
rience, The Odour constitutes a poetic and deeply participatory exegesis
of 2 Corinthians 2:15: For wee are unto God, a sweet savour of Christ.
As the words My Master enter into his ear, the speaker fuses with the Word
as the servant of the Father, thereby becoming an echo of divinity. Should
God accept his service by breathing the words My servant in response to
Herberts call to My Master, then this breathing would with gains
by sweetning me (As sweet things traffick when they meet) / Return to
thee. While this intercourse of human and divine voices rests on a theol-
ogy of the Word as both sound and vision, it also arises from a conception
of hearing as the literal receiving of sound into oneself. The conception
of the psyche informing this poem provides a readymade means of estab-
lishing a sense of intimacy with Christ as sound. This is why the poem
involves a kind of annunciation: the speaker is being impregnated with the
Word through the ear so as to give birth to good works in employment.
Herberts use of the phrase My Master exemplifies the belief that there
is a savour in the very terms of Scripture, a sweet taste in the very language
of the Holy Ghost, which in turn is mediated by early modern concep-
tions of sensory experience (Sibbes, 3.276).
The traffic between human and divine voices envisioned in The Odour
rests, in part, on the idea that divine service (like true prayer) is an echo of
the voice of the Word, an idea very similar to the one expressed in Heaven:
The idea that scripture is the voice of God and that true prayer is echo of
that voice lies behind the way the pattern of call and response gets played
out in the final three stanzas of The Odour 2 Cor. 2, especially the pen-
ultimate one:
the Scriptures are Gods Voyce: The Church is his Eccho; a redoubling,
a repeating of some particular syllables, and accents of the same voice. And
as we harken with some earnestnesse, and some admiration at an Eccho,
when perchance we doe not understand the voice that occasioned that
Eccho; so doe the obedient children of God apply themselves to the Eccho
of his Church, when perchance otherwise, they would lesse understand the
voice of God, in his Scriptures, if that voice were not so redoubled unto
them. (6.11.223)
While the image of thrusting himself into the words My Master may
conjure up the act of eagerly smelling flowers, it is also an entirely appro-
priate description of attentive listening; for the sound made by the words
enter into the ear in the form of oscillating air that literally fills up the
wickets of the soul with spiritual sense as all by the ear comes in
(The Church-porch, 418). More technically, the words enter the sensus
communis in the form of sound where they blend with other senses in the
production of thought. Such blending results in a curious broth that
feeds and fats his mind. This fusing with the Word does not result in a
transcendence of the body or of the world. On the contrary, it initiates a
reorientation of the self in physical and spiritual space, hence the hope for
lifelong employment expressed in the final stanza.
The Odour powerfully exemplifies Ongs observation that words con-
sist not of corpuscular units but of evanescent sound whose meanings are
never fully determined in their abstract signification but have meaning only
with relation to mans body and to its interaction with its surroundings.32
Languages necessary investments in the body and in human action help
explain why the poem concludes with the hope of remaining in a state of
spiritual employment, in ongoing and sensually oriented expressions of
faithful works. By the end of The Odour the soul hopes for the same kind
of synesthetic tuning expressed at the end of Christmas where Herbert
blends Petrarchan eye imagery with renaissance ideas of harmony as he prays
that Christs beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine, / Till evn his
beams sing, and my musick shine (3334).
hopes that his newly tuned senses will occasion a renewed relation to God
and that the experience Should all my life employ, and busie me (30).
The final stanza shows The Odour doing very much what one 1613
writer says should be accomplished by acts of spiritual reading. In such
acts, we should seek not only information concerning spiritual matters
but preferably in addition their flavor and emotional content.34 Behind
such statements is the broader concern that post-reformation Christianity
was being reduced to whatever could be taught and learnt, to mere infor-
mation transfer. It is precisely this concern that gives Herberts depiction
of hearing and sound much of its spiritual and historical exigency. If the
act of divine hearkening only really happens when it evokes the gustum
and affectum of thought as a sensual experience, then what better way to
teach spiritual reading than through poetry?
These parallels between the sensuality of spiritual reading and the phys-
iology of sacred listening may offer us a glimpse of the mutually reinforc-
ing relations between orality and literacy at work in The Temple. After all,
the lived experience of orality underlies the sequences psalmic and liturgi-
cal dimensions, its echo poems and antiphonic verses, and its catechistical
and dialogical elements. Moreover, its proverbial and allegorical features
arise from formulaic patterns typical of oral traditions. Indeed, even the
titles of Herberts poems have been linked to the orally based tradition of
commonplace books.35 So, by becoming more self-conscious about how
richly invested Herberts poetry is in oral modes of communication and
their accompanying forms of historically and phenomenologically medi-
ated sense experience, The Temple will reveal itself to us in ways that are at
once familiar and yet new.
The aim of this chapter has been to show how Herberts insistence that
the Christian narrative is a mystery in which believers immanently partici-
pate is reinforced by the physics, physiology, and theology of early mod-
ern concepts of sound. If Herbert shares Jeremy Taylors view that the
complex richness of the Word should serve as the basis for Christian fel-
lowship, then he also recognized the inherently communal and dialogical
dimensions of the Word that Ong sees as crucial to the best of renaissance
poetics. This is why the liturgical features of The Temple are so integral
to its spiritual aesthetic, especially its focus on faith and poetry as kines-
34
J.Alvarez de Paz De Exterminatione Maeli et Promotione Boni libiri, 3.5.2.2 Cited in
Stock, After Augustine, 107.
35
See Ferry, Titles 314344 and Bauer, Herberts Titles, 266279.
256 G. KUCHAR
thetic processes that move in time, space, and bodies.36 Importantly, such
kinesthetic features further show that Herberts poetry was nourished by
an increasing emphasis on scripturally mediated experiences of mystery
and wonder with the sense of provisionality and perspectival awareness
attendant therein. To hear the Word, Herbert insists, following Augustine,
is to hear it from somewhere in time and space.
36
For studies that emphasize the centrality of liturgy to Herbert, see John Wall,
Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1988) and Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For a competing view, see Doerksen,
Conforming to the Word.
CHAPTER 9
Conclusion
to know God and the soul (Deum et animam scire cupio), he brings a
major feature of Herberts nondogmatic poetics into focus.2 According to
the Soliloquies, prayers for understanding constitute the ur-genre of prayer,
the very archetype of prayer itself. Rather than being merely one kind of
prayer among a host of possible types, like thanksgiving, praise, complaint,
or repentance, prayers for understandingsuch as in Solomons dream
vision in 1 Kings 3 or Davids in Psalm 119constitute the very essence of
prayer. For Augustine, prayer is always at some basic level a method of dis-
covery, a modus inveniendi. This means that prayer is less a means of peti-
tioning God than it is first and foremost a way of receiving him. As Joseph
Hall asserts, Prayer is our speech to God, so is each good meditation
Gods speech to the heart: the heart must speak to God, that God may
speak to it.3 From this perspective, there is no radical distinction between
prayer and spiritual reading; the two are inherently bound up with one
another. As Origen says, What is most necessary for understanding [scrip-
ture] is prayer.4 This is especially true in the more advanced states of sanc-
tification that Saint Anthony assumes when he asserts, He who knows
that he is praying has not yet begun to pray.5 Such is the state to which
Herbert aspires when he asks to see God in all things, thereby making even
drudgerie divine (The Elixir, 18). In a fully realized state of holiness,
all acts are a form of prayer, including acts of spiritual reading. If Herberts
The Temple can be said to aspire to one fundamental thing, it is this state of
complete immersion within the divine mystery. Perhaps this is why at least
20 of the 164 poems in The Church are explicitly structured as prayers
of understanding including such key poems as The Elixir, which begins,
Teach me, my God and King, / In all things thee to see (12), and
Faith, which opens: Lord, how couldst thou so much appease / Thy
wrath for sinne, as when mans sight was dimme, / And could see little, to
regard his ease, / And bring by Faith all things to him? (14).
More than a theme per se, this broad understanding of prayer as a form
of spiritual discovery orients the structure, movement, and experience of
Herberts poems. That is, it animates his very conception of poetry as a
2
Saint Augustine, Soliloquies, trans. Gerard Watson (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1990),
3031.
3
Cited in John Booty, Three Anglican Divines On Prayer: Jewel, Andrewes, Hooker (Society
of St. John the Evangelist: Cambridge, MA, 1977), 35.
4
Cited in Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen
trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 89.
5
Cited in Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 279.
CONCLUSION 259
When Herbert tells us that poetry is that which while I use / I am with
thee, he intimates a dialectical relation between the lyric as a medium
and the mystery of spiritual growth. He suggests that the lyric as a form
mediates his understanding of Christian spirituality as revealed through
images, conceits, metaphors, figures, parables, and so on. Rather than sim-
ply depicting prayer, Herbert conceived of poetry as a species of prayer for
understanding vis--vis poetic figuration and composition. To this extent,
Herbert shared Augustines view that prayer involves listening for what
one knows without knowing that one knows it. As Augustine explains in
his Letter to Proba, prayer often arises out of an underlying experience of
precognition because the Holy Spirit
6
Thomas Cooper, The Wonderful Mystery of Spiritual Growth (London: 1622), B1.
260 G. KUCHAR
makes the saints ask with unspeakable groanings, breathing into them the
desire of this great thing, as yet unknown, which we await in patience. For,
how could it be put into words when what is desired is unknown? On the
one hand, if it were entirely unknown, it would not be desired; and on the
other, if it were seen, it would not be desired or sought with groanings.7
On this account, the very desire for God bears within it a pre-
instinctual or unconscious knowledge of God and the holiness he makes
possible, hence Herberts use of dramatic irony. If we hear more than his
speakers intend, it is often because the Holy Spirit is figured as speaking
through his poems.
Rather than being Wordsworthian recollections, Herberts poems are
carefully crafted spiritual exercises in which we overhear the speaker in
dialogue with God even as we remain immanent participants with the
scriptural drama unfolding in The Temple. Here I am in general agreement
with Kristine Wolberg who proposes that
7
See Saint Augustine, Letters Volume 2, trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons (Washington
D.C.Catholic University of America Press, 1966), 399 and Clarke, Theory and Theology.
8
Kristine A.Wolberg, All Possible Art, 133. For a related view of the medieval religious
lyric see Judson Boyce Allen, Grammar, Poetic Form, and the Lyric Ego: A Medieval A
Priori in Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages. ed. Lois Ebin (Western Michigan University
Press: Kalamazoo, 1984), 227248.
9
Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2004), chapter 5.
CONCLUSION 261
10
C.S.Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965),
491.
262 G. KUCHAR
11
See Calvin Institutes 3.20.1.146 and Blaise Pascal, Penses, trans. A.J.Krailsheimer (New
York: Penguin, 1995), 125.
12
Saint Augustine, Confessions trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 3.
CONCLUSION 263
the hopes that Christs blessed SACRIFICE be mine (12, 14). This
productive ambiguity over the line between personal prayer and public
rite arises from a shared conviction of the corpus mysticum as an ongoing
action unfolding in time, one in which all of the churchs devotional acts
participate in a broadly conceived and purposefully ill-defined eucharistic
vision. Yet, it also arises from the belief that the eucharist is called a
sacrifice inasmuch as it doth represent the passion of Christ and likewise
because it is called hostia, an host, inasmuch as it containeth Christ
Himself, Who is Hostia salutaris (5.261). In other words, the eucha-
rist participates in the sacrifice of Calvary though it does not literally
repeat it much as Herbert hopes his poems will participate in Christs
blessed sacrifice for the benefit of its readers. This qualified sense of
participation in Christs sacrifice was deepened when Herbert replaced
the term onely sacrifice with blessed in the Williams manuscript version of
The Altar. Like Buckeridge, Herbert insists in a perfectly Augustinian
manner on the singular nature of the crucifixion on Calvary while nev-
ertheless allowing for a sense of participation with it. So, while I agree
with Robert Whalen that for Herbert Eucharistic topoi were not
only necessary and effectual means of grace but also the conceptual and
psychological framework within which to imagine its application to the
human heart,16 I would nevertheless add one caveat: in adopting this
kind of eucharistic vision Herbert was more consistent with the open-
ended dimensions of the so-called avant-garde wing of the Jacobean
church than is often thought. After all, the idea that internal religious
experience was a distinctive feature of both moderate and more radical
puritan divinity mistakes a puritan talking point for a firm truth.17 As
Buckeridges sermon makes clear, the question at stake for ceremonial-
ists is not whether to cultivate an inward, private religious life or not.
(That counterreformers of all stripes almost universally did so should
go without saying.) Instead, their concern is with what relationship per-
tains between internal religious experience and the public action of the
church. To put Herberts The Altar in context is to recognize how it
situates private prayer within a broader eucharistic context in much the
same way that Buckeridge does.
As with Luthers translation of mysterion, what is fundamentally at
stake in Buckeridges account of communion is the question of Christian
16
Whalen, Poetry of Immanence, 112.
17
See Ibid. My emphasis.
266 G. KUCHAR
the mystical body of Christ in which Herbert hopes The Temple will par-
ticipate is understood as an evolving and growing community of believers
and not a reflection of a static ideal.
A similarly nondogmatic sense of scripture and tradition as the one
expressed in Buckeridges funeral sermon for Andrewes finds expression
in Herberts To all Angels and Saints. Directed at church papists and
Catholic recusants, the poem is unusually controversial in substance. At
the same time, however, it shows remarkable compassion for its presump-
tive audience. Like Buckeridges sermon, it expresses a kind of double-
movement toward Catholicism. On the one hand, Herbert expresses
criticism of saint veneration; but on the other, he acknowledges continuity
with and sympathy for those who practice it:
Oh glorious spirits
Of all the remarkable things in this poem, none is more significant than
the phrase ever ready in the lyrics penultimate line. In context, this con-
cluding phrase expresses moderate confidence in the nature of true devotion;
but much more, it gestures toward future dialogue, as though the speaker
were saying: over to you Roman Catholics. Like Hooker and Augustine,
Herberts To all Angels and Saints intimates the potential contingency of
scriptural interpretation, including on matters of dogma. In doing so, the
poem displays the same tendency as James I to play down the Church of
Englands differences with Roman Catholicism while nevertheless maintain-
ing a strong sense of the state churchs Protestantism.21 Unlike men such
as George Abbot, who referred to Catholics as vassals of the Antichrist
and adorers of the beast, James tended to equate puritan and Catholic
threats as arising more from doctrinally indifferent questions of worship and
policy than fundamentals of dogma.22 The result was a subtle and even some-
what detached attitude toward Rome, one that generally avoided polemical
extremes. It was most likelyout of this distinctly Jacobean attitude toward
Rome that Herberts To all Angels and Saints was written.23
Herberts relatively open-minded religious positioning reflects an
intellectual culture that was becoming increasingly sensitive to Hookers
insight that no theological method or institution can be infallibly assured
of its own correctness even when grounded on scripture alone.24 Or as
Hooker puts it: It is not the worde of God which doth or possibilie can
assure us, that wee doe well to thinke it his worde.25 Consistent with this
insight about the limits of the sola scriptura principle, To all Angels and
Saints implies that what is scripturally sanctioned is not self-evident but
subject to change through collective dialogue. While the poem presumes
the primary authority of scripture for determining true worship, and
while it articulates a relatively confident sense of what true worship is, its
ending nevertheless allows for the possibility that on the question of saint
veneration the interpretive tradition of the church may evolve through
21
Fincham and Lake, Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I, 182183.
22
Ibid., 182183.
23
The more hostile attitude toward Rome expressed in The Church Militant may reflect
a subsequent breakdown in the conditions for such an attitude later in James reign among
many conformists. Though even there, Herbert sustains a view of the church as evolving over
time in unexpected ways.
24
See Egil Grislis, The Hermeneutical Problem in Richard Hooker in Studies in Richard
Hooker ed. W.Speed Hill, 159206, 179.
25
Hooker, Laws 1:153-13-25 cited in N.Voak, Richard Hooker and the Principle of Sola
Scriptura Journal of Theological Studies 59 (2008), 96139, 131.
CONCLUSION 269
subsequent dialogue about scripture. So, like Calvin and the puritans,
Herberts lyric acknowledges that getting scripture wrong means violat-
ing Gods authority. After all, All worship is prerogative, and a flower /
Of his rich crown (2122). Yet, like Hooker, the poem presumes that
disagreement is inevitable because scriptural interpretations are necessarily
subject to error, both collective and individual. As Herbert makes clear in
The Country Parson, scripture often differs from itself in ways that patristic
and other authorities help clarify: For the Law required one thing, and
the Gospel another: yet as diverse, not as repugnant: therefore the spirit of
both is to be considered, and weighed (229).
It is surely no coincidence that one of the periods closest parallels to
Herberts poem on angels and saints comes from an intellectual who loved
to stress that the whole Creation is a mystery, and particularly that of
man. In Religio Medici, Sir Thomas Browne confessed:
I should violate my owne arme rather then a Church, nor willingly deface
the memory of Saint or Martyr. At the sight of a Crosse or Crucifix I can dis-
pence with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour;
I cannot laugh at but rather pity the fruitlesse journeys of Pilgrims, or con-
temne the miserable condition of Friers; for though misplaced in circum-
stance, there is something in it of devotion.26
suggests that the limitations God places on believers in scripture are spiri-
tually vivifying in much the same way that highly disciplined poetic forms
like the Elizabethan sonnet are aesthetically edifying. Just as poetry relies
on the tension between familiarity and surprise, form and variation, so
sanctification rests on the tension between the habits of faith and the free-
dom of the Spirit, predictable discipline and unpredictable transformation.
In this way, H.Scriptures intimates the underlying continuity between
spiritual and aesthetic life that is a central feature of Silex Scintillans.
The parallel between poetry and spirituality animating Silex Scintillans
is part and parcel of the way Vaughan hopes his sweetest Art will do
for others what he prays scripture will do for him (11), hence his daringly
nondogmatic conflation of Silex Scintillans with scripture in the direct
address to readers in the sonnets closing couplet: Read here, my faults
are thine. This Book, and I / Will tell thee so; Sweet Saviour thou didst
dye! (1314). Not only does Vaughan conflate his book with scripture
here, he suggests that it serves the same mirroring function as Holy Writ.
By incorporating his readers into the poem in this manner, Vaughan hopes
that his lyrics will invite the kind of participatory reading practices nor-
mally associated with scripture as mirror.
The general outlines of Herberts overall spiritual aesthetic find further
expression in the literary theory that Vaughan summarizes in Affliction,
one of his admiringly insightful responses to The Temple. Balancing loose
flowing assonance with quickly clipped consonants, Vaughan insists that
both beauty and truth lie in the experience of spiritual transformation,
even when such experience is as excruciating as torture. Following both
scripture and Herbert, Vaughan construes beauty as something that hap-
pens more than as something that is.27 For Vaughan,
27
For a discussion of scriptural conceptions of beauty as process, see Gerard von Rad Old
Testament Theology vol. 1. The Theology of Israels Historical Traditions, trans. D.M.G.Stalker
(Harper and Row: NewYork, 1962), 367369.
272 G. KUCHAR
28
See Works of Saint Augustine, 44.244245. For a discussion of Augustines theory of
mimetic inversion, see Karl F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in The West
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 95.
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Index1
B C
Bacon, Francis, 51, 174, 175, 193, Calvin, John
193n7, 194, 194n10, 218, assurance, 16, 97
218n52, 219, 220, 220n54, certainty, 7783
222, 224n61, 2258, 230, deus absconditus, 59n53
237, 237n11, 237n12, 238, exegesis, 79
238n13, 243 origin of faith, 262
Barrett, William, 8890, 99 perseverance, 107, 108
Baxter, Richard, 160 security, 83
Beaumont, Joseph, 1734 1 Timothy 3:16, 60
Beckwith, Sarah, 266n20 tradition, 92, 268
Bedford, R.D., 159n1 Campbell, Gordon, 233n1
Beeke, Joel. R., 14n19, 15n27, Caragounis, Chrys C., 34n3, 35n12
74n4, 75n10, 83n34 Cary, Phillip, 56n44, 59n51
Beiser, Fredrick C., 161n6 Cavell, Stanley, 45, 45n25
Bell, Ilona, 123n1, 207n38, 208, Cefalu, Paul, 81n28, 83n33, 91n27,
208n40, 217, 217n50 119n31, 261n9
Bernard, of Clairvaux, 46, 46n27 certainty, 23, 223, 71100. See also
Betts, C.J., 98n71 assurance; Calvin, John; Hooker,
Beza, Theodore, 125, 126 Richard; rationalism; security
INDEX 283
The Familie, 7 J
The Flower, 30, 1557 Jewel, John, 18
The Forerunners, 219 John, Gospel of, 64, 146
The Glimpse, 138 Jordan, W.K., 98n70
The H.Scriptures (I), 3, 1327 joy. See Augustine, St., Gospel of
The H.Scriptures (II), 1327 John; Bultmann, Rudolph;
The Invitation, 82, 146 Herbert, George; Sibbes, Richard
The New Year Sonnets, 1949,
210, 238
The Odour, 2. Cor. 2, 23944 K
The Quidditie, 2235, 229 Kelleher, Hillary, 42n21
The Reprisall, 137, 20713 Kierkegaard, Sren, 29
The Sacrifice, 20713 King James bible, 216, 134
The Search, 418, 50 King James I, 47, 90n55, 99,
The Sonne, 910 99n75, 100n76, 268n21
The Temper (I), 7, 1367 Knight, Janice, 8n9, 14n22,
The Temper (II), 21213 17n32, 23n50
The Thanksgiving, 45, 209, 210 Kuchar, Gary, 42n20, 195
The Water-course, 20n41, 150
The Windows, 140
To all Angels and Saints, 264 L
Ungratefulnesse, 3641, Lake, Peter, 17n29, 17n30, 23n49,
49, 512 24, 25, 25n52, 52n36, 88n49,
Unkindnesse, 182 89, 89n50, 90n55, 91, 93n67
Vanitie, 219, 2278 Lammott, Anne, 257n1
Herbert, Henry, 163 Latimer, Hugh, 86n44, 224
Hill, D.M., 218n51 Laudianism, 12
Hill, Eugene D., 160n3, 163 law and gospel. See Andrewes,
Hill, W.Speed, 87n46 Lancelot; Luther, Martin;
Hodgkins, Christopher, 10, 10n12, Sibbes, Richard
152n46 Lewis, C.S., 261n10
Hooker, Richard, 15, 16n27, 19 Linden, Stanton J., 197n15
critique of certainty, 847, Locke, John, 160, 18990
131, 149 Louth, Andrew, 182n34
doubt, 845 de Lubac, Henri, 35, 48, 51n34,
security, 834, 103 56n45, 217, 217n49
tradition, 92, 267 Luke, Gospel of, 47, 207
Hunt, Arnold, 13n19, 233, Luther, Martin, 25
234n2, 247 anamorphosis, 67
certainty, 737
deus absconditus, 59n53,
I 59n54, 60n55
Isaiah, 112 doubt, 767
286 INDEX
P
M Parker, T.H.L., 74n4
MacDonald, Michael, 85n38 Pascal, Blaise, 262, 262n11
Mackenzie, Iain M., 219n53 Perkins, William, 1416, 23, 94,
Martz, Louis, 21n43, 102, 136n34 94n68, 115, 115n25, 193
Matthews, Steven, 224n61 perseverance. See Augustine, St.;
McCanles, Michael, 224n61 Calvin, John; Herbert, George
McCullough, Peter, 8n9, 23n49 Phil., 5, 38
McGee, Sears J., 17n30, 20n42, Pitkin, Barbara, 73n4, 81, 81n29,
25n54, 80n25 118n30
McMahon, Robert, 66 Poitiers, Peter of, 207, 207n39
Milton, Anthony, 13n19, 19n39 Porter, H.C., 83, 83n34
Moore, Jonathan D., 13 Powers-Beck, Jeffrey, 170, 171n21
Muller, Richard A., 54, 54n38, 120 prayer, 11, 1049. See also Augustine,
mystagogy, 15, 31 St.; Donne, John; Goodwin,
mysterion, 7, 15, 27, 34, 34n2, 35, 38, Thomas; Herbert, George
48, 51, 5362. See also Andrewes, Preston, John, 15, 16, 16n28, 23, 24
Lancelot; Augustine, St.; Luther, Prior, Charles W.A., 19n27, 92n62,
Martin; Sibbes, Richard 152n46
mystery (eclipse of), 2132, 69. Psalms, 205. See also Augustine, St.
See also Andrewes, Lancelot; puritanism, 1, 8n9, 1218, 235,
Frei, Hans; Muller, Richard A. 857, 90n55
mystery of Christ, 67, 212
mystery of sin, 40, 174
R
Ramus, Peter, 189, 193, 193n7
N rationalism, 279, 98, 99.
neatness, 132, 157, 179 See also Bury, Arthur; Herbert,
negative theology, 42, 42n21, 50, 224 George; Toland, John
Nicolson, Adam, 21n44 Read, Sophie, 183, 183n36,
Nieto, Jos C., 124n6, 125n7, 125n11 263, 263n14
Norton, David, 22n46 Richey, Esther Gilman, 28
Novarr, David, 92n61, 130n19 Romans, 77, 92n62, 101, 105,
Nyssa, Gregory of, 66 106, 115
INDEX 287